I wonder how this will affect the Raspberry Pi foundation. They use Broadcom SoCs and seem to have a pretty good relationship with them.
I had the exact same though, I guess time will tell.
That seems to say that theres not a technical issue with making an rpi-compatible SBC but a political one.
The GPIOs, GPU, booting process, etc. is all specific to it, and I guess manufacturing a compatible processor would need complicated if not almost impossible reverse engineering and might violate Broadcom's copyright or some contracts.
And a lot of commercial products, programs and libraries depend on the Raspberry Pi, so they have to be able to continue making compatible products.
My understanding is that the BCM2835/BCM2836 production run was dedicated to RasPi, although originally designed for OEM cellphone manufactures.
The figure I heard was that an outsourced SoC costs around $10-20m in licensing and NRE. That is basically go to a company that already has produced SoCs (eg. Samsung) and write a check. Considering that RasPi has sold over 5m units, getting another custom Soc made is not out of reach.
It's not quite the same thing, but I've obtained datasheets for their optical mouse sensors rather easily - possibly because of their Agilent/HP heritage.
Trying to get anything from Broadcom is worse than "pulling teeth from a chook" - I've had better success with small Chinese companies like AllWinner.