Singapore or Delaware
I thought that Broadcom announced it would relocate its legal address from Singapore to Delaware. Hasn't happened yet? Ah, promises promises.
The European Commission is rolling up its sleeves and once again donning its tight plastic gloves, as it begins another probe into a chip designer – this time Silicon Valley-based Broadcom. EU antitrust officials allege the biz, which is the world's largest provider of integrated circuits for wired communication devices, has …
It's a little more complicated than that! For example, Raspberry Pi have written lots of the firmware blob which is used in the Brcm chip in the Raspberry Pi. Which means that third parties cannot use it without Raspberry Pi permission (unlikely to get that for obvious reasons!). So even if someone can buy the chips (they can), they would not be able to use the latest firmware. So third parties making Pi clones using the same chip isn't going to happen.
And that's just one reason.
I believe Raspberry Pi's original business plan called for them to build something like 1,000 units. Because Ebon Upton was a Broadcom employee at the time, and because it was a charitable enterprise, he managed to persuade Broadcomm to let him build the Pis. This despite the fact their normal minimum order is probably a hundred times that. Any other startup would have a hard time persuading them to do that.
Of course in the end, it turned out that the business plan was inaccurate by the sort of error that would make a cosmologist blush.