[Gllug] wifi card

[Mike Brodbelt]

Russell Howe wrote:

> I expect someone will invest some time and effort shoehorning OpenBSD's
> code to link against the madwifi source,

I sincerely hope so.

> although I doubt the madwifi
> people will commit it to their CVS, as they insist that it's against
> the US FCC rules to have opensource drivers for the Atheros chipset.

Having a free driver would be a good reason for a fork, IMHO, even if it
ended up being maintained outside the US. OpenBSD don't seem to have had
a problem, and I find it difficult to understand why the supposedly pro
GPL Linux userbase actually cares less about freedom than the OpenBSD camp.

> Whether they're talking crap or not, I don't know, but they seem quite
> committed to keeping a binary only chunk in their driver.

The FCC thing comes as I understand it, from the fact that you're not
allowed to sell radio devices that don't comply with FCC emission
standards in the US, to prevent interference. Most wifi cards have FCC
compliant hardware, and so aren't a problem. The Atheros cards do not
have hardware limits on emitted power, rather this is controlled by the
driver (specifically by the HAL). So, a user with source to the HAL
could theoretically modify the HAL to allow the card to be configured so
that it violated FCC regs.

Personally I think their argument is utter crap - either it's OK to ship
a card where power level is software controlled or it's not. If the
latter, Atheros should be forced by the FCC to put hardware limiters on
the cards. If the former, then a sophisticated user will always be able
to violate FCC rules by reverse engineering the driver. The availability
of source for a driver just makes the job quicker - it has no effect on
whether it's possible or not. Either way, it is Atheros' (and the FCC's)
problem to deal with - the madwifi project doesn't change the lagality
of Atheros' product. Ironically, Atheros seems to have been pretty
helpful to the madwifi project, and doesn't seem to have made any fuss
about the OpenBSD reverse engineered HAL either. So it seems to be the
madwifi people who are the blockage on getting a truly free driver. And
to add insult to injury the code is flaky too...

Mike.
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