Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

so it was easy to see the broadcom driver as being a superset of the b43 driver.

they probably thought that it would be less work to modify the already working broadcom driver to fit the kernel better than it would be to modify the reverse engineered b43 driver to support all the other stuff.

as it appears to have turned out, the team working to improve the b43 driver was able to add support faster than the broadcom team was able to revamp their driver to fit the kernel.

it could have easily turned out the other way. If the changes had not turned out to be as intrusive, or if the b43 team had not been as quick to add new support we could easily be celebrating replacing the reverse engineered driver that works for most people most of the time with a driver that supports all the chipsets all of the time because the people developing it understand the chipsets better.

and there is still the unanswered question of how much the broadcom driver being in staging helped the b43 driver team