Tulip, which was initially developed by NASA, is an open-source project. As such, it is incumbent upon the due diligence of each distro to make sure that it can properly detect the various modifications thereof.
The tulip driver is actually maintained as it's own project (http://tulip.sourceforge.net I think), and also by the kernel maintainers. Of course many distributions have people working on the kernel and possibly the tulip driver, but it's more a function of the linux kernel, which is largely the same across all distributions (it's what makes them Linux).
--MonMotha
