On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 20:47 +0200, Michael Buesch wrote: > On Wednesday 11 June 2008 19:44:52 Tim Gardner wrote: > > John, > > > > Here is the URL to Broadcom's web site advertising their open source > > driver with support for the BCM4313. > > > > http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php > > > > rtg > > <quote> > Make sure that you download the appropriate tar because the hybrid binary > file must be of the appropriate architecture type. The hybrid binary file > is agnostic to the specific version of the Linux kernel because it is > designed to perform all interactions with the operating system through > operating-system-specific files... > </quote> Sure, they are trying to do the MadWifi thing, but it's too late since a good free driver exists already, even if it doesn't support that particular chip. Still, the glue code and the headers are under GPL. It may be useful for reverse engineering efforts. Perhaps the non-free object files could be used to extract firmware from them. But the license won't allow distribution of that firmware, if I understand correctly. What Broadcom could easily do is to release the firmware under a license that would allow free distribution. This way, the firmware would be on installation CDs of the popular distributions, and there would be no need to install b43-fwcutter, get the firmware (that's a challenge in absence of a wired network), extract the firmware and install it into the right directory. That would make Broadcom cards make out-of-box, and ultimately make them more popular. Instead, Broadcom tries to control the code its users are running. I don't think it's going to work well. But to be fair to them, at least they don't pretend that Linux doesn't exit. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
