All of FOSS is not Linux.
Of course, drivers+documentation would be even better :)
Vendor "support" for their driver means a third-string intern/student who hashes together patches that reveal profound ignorance of the architecture.
Its not just NIH; the chain of custody from silicon designer to you just doesn't include ANYBODY who has your interests/your customer's interests in mind. They are more concerned with making the driver portable across their product line, doing it cheaply, getting it to market at the same time their hardware releases etc.
Any robustness/architecture/responsible software processes have to be your business and yours alone. This probably means rewriting the whole driver, using the demo driver for reference but ONLY for chip-specific info.
"black box" reverse engineering - systems are observed without examining internal structure.
"white box" reverse engineering - the inner workings of the system are inspected.
(People who use Linux and your chipsets already know why this is such a good news.)
(I say "older," because my BCM4322 is such a chipset, and it's in my 15-month-old MacBook Pro. How is that "old?")
Regardless, whatever their motivations, it's a nice start. I wonder if they plan to collaborate with the guys working on the b43 driver at all. They support a ton of chipsets, and (at least from my perspective) the main deficiency is the not-yet-finished (partly due to the reverse-engineering effort being incomplete) N-PHY support for the 11n chipsets.
Now if only this happened two years ago, I'd have been running linux for two years.
