Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

>and who is going to do this work?

I would assume both parties that are trying to reach the same goal if not I would think the vendor him self would have the final saying in it after all he knows his product best and what's coming up next and has all the required information about his product and so fourth and so on hence having the vendor backing the driver development beats the reverse engineering any time. ( ofcourse the best end result is if they could work together ).

So I quote Henry's response to the thread

"As we add new, much more complicated chips, those chips will also get complete, full-performance, fully-tested support."

If you put this into end user perspective this is not even an question of which one should be dropped if it comes down to it.
( which could be limited to "once you provide equal or better support than b43 we will replace your driver with b43 in mainline" )

Fully supported Broadcom chipsets backed tested and production ready which is on various range of hw available at the same or similar time as it is for other OS vs reversed engineered Broadcom chipset limited to what ever hw range the engineers have access to and what time they have to spare working on reverse engineering it *from* the time they acquired that hw.

On in on I think the ramification of turning down vendors when they finally decide/have been talked into investing their resources into open sourcing their drivers and get it into mainline is rather great.

For all we know they might decide that this was a lost cause, flag the effort as tried and tested with expenses down the drain and never look back.