hell freezes over!

[Alan Cox]

> > I wonder what changed to cause Broadcom to change tune.  Broadcom seemed
> > to think that their secret sauce was oh so important to keep secret.
> >
> > -wolfgang
> 
> I think the reason was that the driver would expose information
> about the inner design of their chipset, which they felt might
> compromise the secrecy of product design advantages (or perhaps 
> disadvantages).

Broadcom have been helpful in other areas.

Wireless has been particularly problematic for many vendors for a long
time because the US regulations require wireless devices are not user
tamperable. This leads to questions like "what does that mean if it's open
source and you can set an unapproved frequency or power by hacking the
code"

The penalties for getting that wrong are rather high. Some vendors have
done things like alternate firmware which does the sanity checks on card.
I've no idea what actually drove the Broadcom decision and how they've
actually addressed it, but for wireless manufacturers the open-sourcing
decisions have been a good deal more complicated than simple "secret
sauce" type arguments.

Alan