Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

The thing that the kernel developers are optimizing for is the ability to do long-term maintenance on their own. They presume that the person who wrote the code might not be the only person who needs to maintain the code which is why they are so insistent that any code follows the style guidelines and does not have it's own internal abstraction layers or API that other kernel developers would be unfamiliar with. They are absolutely willing to pass on a working driver if it is seen to increase the long-term maintenance burden of the kernel. Given that others will end up maintaining this driver in the future, don't they have a choice in what they accept?

I think this attitude is largely driven by the reiserfs debacle, which may have been mentioned elsewhere, where a large body of code was accepted in good faith that it would be maintained but was quickly abandoned which left no-one available who understood it and was qualified to maintain it. It put the kernel developers in an awful position, distributing code that they were unable to effectively support, that they are desperate to never repeat.