Huh? After joining up, broadcom produced the "brcmsmac" driver, which is now part of mainline, and modern broadcom devices typically work out of the box. Broadcom joining the Linux Foundation certainly had a lot of effect. It's just that these things take time. If nVidia makes the call that they are going to support OSS drivers today, it would likely take at least a year before anything percolated up to normal users.
I'm just saying that out of my own experience.
I found a bug in their driver with kernel 2.6.37 and I wrote a patch and sent them. The answer I got was:
"Our internal version works properly with 2.6.37 but we haven't had enough complaints to make releasing this patch necessary" (ok, those weren't the exact words but that was the meaning of it).
So I learned not to expect much of them.
