Broadcom Switches to the Light Side: The Start of a New Era?
As anyone familiar with the Linux wireless scene before 2006 knows, Broadcom, which manufacturers the wireless chipsets found in many laptops, was for a long time synonymous with everything evil about closed-source software. That’s changing. Here’s how.
Last summer, Broadcom suddenly and quietly reversed its anti-Linux policies by releasing drivers for certain Broadcom wireless cards. Most of the source code is closed, and at this point only a handful of chipsets (mostly newer ones) are supported. But this development, which has remained more or less under the radar, nonetheless has important implications that extend well beyond the wireless scene.
Most significant is the fact that, as far as the (admittedly scattered and minimal) evidence indicates, Broadcom’s change of heart towards Linux was a direct result of the newfound leverage that Canonical is able to wield on behalf of the free-software community. An Ubuntu developer writes:
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