Can you say more? What's made it worse recently? I was witness to some struggle between GumStix and Intel/Marvell back around when Marvell bought the XScale pro

Can you say more? What's made it worse recently? I was witness to some struggle between GumStix and Intel/Marvell back around when Marvell bought the XScale processor line, but I've been out of touch with Intel on this issue since then. However I've seen countless peripheral silicon manufacturers maintain strangleholds on their softloaded firmware... Though with things like wireless chipsets and DSP algorithms, it's arguable there's real IP there worth protecting.