Breakage of this type is deliberate punishment for trying to maintain a closed-source driver (as in Windows). Closed source drivers force us in the Linux community to rely on people such as "Aladdin Knowledge Systems", "IBM", etc. to provide timely updates so we can use new features in new kernels (such as the kernel virtualization that will soon appear in 2.6.20), or to run new motherboards that require the absolute newest kernel. It can also create an impossible situation where we need one version of the kernel for certain hardware, another version for your HASP driver, etc..

The kernel developers do not worry at all about those trying to maintain "illegal closed source drivers" (their terminology) when cleaning unused non-GPL interface symbols, because "unused" means "not used by any modules in the kernel tree, or any modules being considered for inclusion in the kernel tree". The proper way is for your driver to be submitted to the kernel.org people for inclusion/maintenance, or move its functionality into userspace.