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Comment by dhon_ | Hacker News Reader

In this case though, the new driver has the same license as the project it was based on and explicitly credits the original project

  ISC License
  
  Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation
  Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors
  
  Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver.

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This surprised me - but sure enough, they're right. The linux brcmfmac driver is ISC licensed:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/wi...

// SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC

A lot of Linux kernel drivers are permissively licensed, or dual-licensed with a choice of GPL and a permissive license. This is especially common for vendor-developed drivers. From a hardware vendor’s perspective, broad license compatibility directly supports adoption: the more operating systems, hypervisors, and embedded environments that can incorporate the driver code, the wider the potential market for the hardware itself.

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