Qualcomm Buys Atheros For $3.1 Billion

The real question is, what is this going to do for future Atheros chipsets and open source drivers? Atheros has always been the chipset to use for Wifi on open source operating systems because it was generally well supported, and provided features the competition couldn't.<p>I really hope that Qualcomm doesn't change anything in that regard.

I thought Wifi was a commodity market now. So I'm a little surprised to see Qualcomm buying into a commodity market. What does Atheros have that Qualcomm can't license cheaply from elsewhere and use it's own relationships to sell? This seems like Atheros quitting when they're at the top (smart move by them).<p>Is Qualcomm <i>really</i> interested in supplying to the smallish market for $30 wifi routers and network cards? I haven't ever seen an Atheros-powered laptop, which is a much larger market.<p>I used always looked for Atheros-powered wifi desktop cards because of their Linux support, but nowadays it seems like several chipsets are well-supported.