I wonder if Oxide considered something like the Mellanox Spectrum. I'm not sure if there is as good/any support for BSD which might have been a fatal flaw. And the lack of integration in their HWROT.
We tried to -- we couldn't get Mellanox to even acknowledge that they made switching silicon! The other challenge we were going to have with them was getting the kind of deep access that we would need to build rack-level networking, let alone as open source -- of which the inability to integrate with our HW RoT is but one example.
For having tried to install a Linux distribution on other switches with Broadcom ASIC I can tell you that having some kinds of drivers, free to use by anyone, without the need to sign an NDA, is incredible !
