I wonder if it is market pressure

> What I am wondering about, is if this is happening because Atheros is losing business to
Intel on a scale that makes it worthwhile to hire a developer. 



I know that with my EEE I ended up with a Atheros wifi. It wasn't even supported under
Madwifi, Xandros used these special 'swan' drivers I haven't heard of before. 

So I know that lots of Linux people were upset about that and it required the use of
ndiswrapper for a while till Atheros released a special patch specifically to allow Madwifi
driverrs to work. I told other people before the EEE came out that I was dissapointed that
Asus choose Atheros over Ralink or Intel, of course they all thought Madwifi was cool... until
after the EEE came out the Madwifi folks were completely powerless to support the hardware
until that HAL hack was released by Atheros.

Keep in mind that a angy customer making a support call is enough for Asus to loose
profitability on that EEE sale...

So they defenately were paying attention and it was a big enough issue that they (Atheros) had
to do a abnormal release.

I expect that other manufacturers were paying close attention to the EEE and they would of
noticed the problems with having to support a single-kernel-specific proprietary module and
the problems it caused OEMs and customers. 

Where as if they used Intel (or a handful of other manufacturer's cards) then it would of been
a complete non-issue. I expect that this has caused Atheros to loose out on a couple big
potential customers.