Broadcom (and to a lesser extent, Realtek) devices had always been anywhere between hit-or-miss and completely unworkable on Linux, LONG before Raspberry Pi came around.
It's MIT licensed now, which isn't particularly useful when it comes to Pi (there's some Broadcom crap in that boot loader so it won't be open sourced) but otherwise is kind of interesting.
I always saw Broadcom as evil, and saw Raspberry Pi as just reusing cheap parts from set top boxes or similar, with all the proprietary stuff that that comes with.
Here's the real problem.
It's sad how a company that spawned the raspberry pi in earlier times got so evil so quickly.