Quoting Mark Trickett (marktrickett@gmail.com):
Please elucidate why.
Oh, I was just being judgemental and only symbolically bloodthirsty -- just like when I recently went on a guided tour of Boeing Company's Everett and Renton assembly plants wearing, as a semi-private joke for my wife's and my benefit, this t-shirt.[1] Both Broadcom and Marvell have been totally uncooperative with open source driver coders, possibly out of inability to focus on business in at least one of those two companies' cases.[2] Consequently, the open source community must do more than the usual amount of work reverse-engineering new chipsets they introduce. (Fortunately, in most cases, the newer chips turn out to be minor variations on older ones, but then there are always problematic exceptions, too.
Broadcom have backed the Raspberry Pi in various ways.
I indeed hear they have. Might be that an old dog learns new tricks on occasion. Of course, that's mostly their ARM SoC, right? Not their network chips that have been the occasional source of low-level pain for kernel people. But I'll confess in advance that I'm vague on details. [1] Dad was a Pan American World Airways captain until his life ended early on Dec. 26, 1968 courtesy of a defective-from-manufacture Boeing 707. So, Inigo's always been a personal favourite. And, yeah, sorry, morbid humour's been my thing for a long time, too. [2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/16/broadcom_ceo_charges/