Neither are particularly friendly, just Qualcomm acquired an open wifi business and only slowly bled it into a proprietary firmware driver.

Qualcomm is largely responsible for how proprietary and draconian most mobile phones are, though.

true, Qualcomm was hostile to OSS, until it bought Atheros, and it kept Atheros open, so Qualcomm is only partially friendly to OSS.

What are you talking about? Qualcomm is still hostile to free software, forcing binary blobs down your throat if you want to use an 802.11ac chipset. Ath10k might be open source, but everything interesting is hidden away by the proprietary firmware, like on Intel and Broadcom chips.

This would be my concern. Qualcomm is trying to buy NXP, who make a whole load of really great chips and microcontrollers (including everything made by Freescale). If the Broadcom attitude eventually makes it down to the NXP divisions, it could really ruin a good range of products.

Oh no! Not NXP! :(

Lack of diversity! What happens to the Rpi and Librem 5 foss-friendly communities if Broadcom buy Qualcomm who buy NXP?

Broadcom are employing Eric Anholt to build a fully open source, upstream DRM/Mesa Gallium driver for the VideoCore 4 (https://anholt.github.io/twivc4/) and assorted Raspberry Pi hardware.

Now that's hardly a big focus of Broadcoms business but you can pretty much run a fully open source GPU accelerated Linux userland on the Raspberry Pis with those efforts.

Bluetooth and WiFi is proprietary though, if I remember correctly. And that is what Broadcom makes money with.

RPI is an exception instead of norm. Other than that you got nothing, not just software, you got nothing on its chips either. I avoided Broadcom on all my designs as much as I can.

They're a brutal vendor to work with unless your huuuge :(

Raspberry PI's SOC is made by Broadcom. They did a decent job in open source that part. I heard even the GPU driver/library was opensource for PI.

GPU driver/library was definitively not opensource for the Freescale's IMX6 as far as I know.

Feel free to point out other issues with Broadcom opensource.

the RPI is an exception, it did not come easy.

Freescale would love to open its GPU etc, however it is licensing the IP from other vendors that Freescale has no right to open source it, yes it would be nice if Freescale can get that part work. Otherwise, Freescale is fairly open on everything it owns and makes.

The Raspberry Pi having a non-closed bootchain, let alone a free driver is a feat of tens of thousands of people pressuring Broadcom, and a few people doing the hard work to free as much of the RPI as they could.

Having to run Raspbian just to boot the board was a dark time!

>Having to run Raspbian just to boot the board was a dark time!

Is this some sort of joke I am missing becuase now the pi can run more than just raspbian?

What? I used to run 9front(a plan9 fork) on raspberry pi back in 2013. Their bootloader is closed source, so you have to use that to load your kernel.

That was the old Broadcom. The new company was formed in 2015 from acquisition by Avago Technologies.