I also got my first and so far only kernel patch submitted years ago:
On my MacBook Pro 2010 with GeForce 320M running any OpenGL application, even glxgears, would crash because it ran out of memory. So I dug into nouveau drm code and found out that some memory related function was using wrong code path for that GPU.
It took some time to figure out how to submit a patch but it felt nice after I got it accepted.
I didn't even know about those patch sanity-checking scripts back then, they look useful for potential future patches!
Yup, I doubt he has experience working in the games industry. Many engines support multiple graphics APIs and there's often only 1-2 employees implementing/maintaining them so speaking about vendor lock-in is not a strong argument.
Supporting both Vulkan and Metal in a game engine is not a huge task. I work in the games industry, my job is to implement and maintain graphics backends to a renderer engine, so I can speak from experience.
Some people like making games, I like making game engines. I don't have a specific goal/target in mind while making it. I've written several game engines since the nineties, and this is my most recent version.
I have abandoned many of my older engines at some point to develop a new one, but with this engine I'll try to keep developing it a lot further before making a new engine.
One reason is that shaders are stored as text and require each driver vendor to write parsers for them and not everyone implements them in the same way.
I don't think the lock-in in the case of graphics APIs is too bad, because even for large codebases implementing a new graphics API support is often done by one or two persons.
I wouldn't leave my bike unlocked in Helsinki. Just last year my bike was stolen near the Parliament house (Kiasma) even though it was locked to the stand.
I also got my first and so far only kernel patch submitted years ago:
On my MacBook Pro 2010 with GeForce 320M running any OpenGL application, even glxgears, would crash because it ran out of memory. So I dug into nouveau drm code and found out that some memory related function was using wrong code path for that GPU.
It took some time to figure out how to submit a patch but it felt nice after I got it accepted.
I didn't even know about those patch sanity-checking scripts back then, they look useful for potential future patches!