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OpenBSD Activism Shows Drivers Can Be Freed
grey continues "This means that currently, these wireless NIC's don't work out of the box on OSS install or boot media. In just the first 4 days, hundreds of users wrote and called vendors, and already 2 vendors freed their firmware, and several others are in discussions with Theo de Raadt about taking similar steps.
We need your help! TI has still not responded at all. You can call or write to Bill Carney, - Director of Business Development of TI's WNBU to add to the approximately 400 well written messages the OpenBSD community has already sent to TI. We hope that you'll help, and if you do please keep messages polite and to the point. Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses (though we wouldn't complain if they did). Instead, ask if they would simply email Theo to open discussions on licensing their firmware binaries under terms that allow for free redistribution. If changed, these firmware binaries would then be able to be included with OSS software and function with existing BSD and GPL licensed device drivers from the start.
You can find other contacts for target vendors here, here, here, and here, and it can't hurt to sign this petition. These changes aide all OSS efforts, not just OpenBSD. As you can see from the OpenBSD community's results already, contacting these vendors really does make a difference. We're sure that with the numbers of OSS minded readers in the Slashdot community you can really help with the heavy lifting where fewer numbers of BSD users have already begun to succeed, and all Open Source Software users will benefit."
The hardware -design- is the "keys to the kingdom" not the firmware, and they're not even asking for the firmware binaries to be open sourced - merely licensed so that they can be distributed freely by OSS vendors. Feels like I'm just quoting the article here, so I guess you might need to reread it more carefully.
If you've dealt with traditional firmware it's called "firm" because it's usually written to a flash memory of some sort on the device (be it CD Burner, NIC, etc.) in this case these vendors are cheaping out on an inexpensive piece of flash memory, and instead designing the 'firmware' to be loaded by the driver, thus unless the driver loads it each time the computer is turned on, then it disappears, it is not static. As such, it makes the hardware utterly useless unless you not only have a device driver, but also this firmware binary loaded. If they had spend a few cents extra and invested in a flash chip that moved with the hardware, this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, they've turned a hardware design issue into a software problem, and if they don't allow for that firmware blob to be redistributed with software drivers (be they proprietary or otherwise) from other vendors - the hardware is useless.
Rather than making a strawman argument about this issue which you didn't take the time to fully understand despite the large amount of text and background links in the story, it would really help everyone if people would write the vendors in question and ask for them to make a minor change. No one is asking them to open their designs a la opencores.org, merely license their firmware blobs in such a way that the firmware can be shipped with other Operating systems that -already- have OSS drivers.
(Going to write and call now instead of waste more breath on slashdot responses)
A: In the case of wireless, the FCC plays a part.
An 802.11 Wireless Card is a software controlled radio, and must be licensed per FCC regs (in the USA, your country's rules might be different). Since the 802.11 PHY operates over several channels within the specified band, it must be able to select and switch between these channels via software, and to adjust its transmit power for optimum performance based on the changes in temperature of the transmitter, and changes in the frequency, among other things.
But different regulatory domains (countries) allow different channels within the bands, meaning a card in the US may be able to operate on a channel in the B band which is not licensed for another country, or vice versa. This is particularly true in the A band, where a whole middle "chunk" is not legal for use in the US.
Bottom line is that in order for the producer to get a license for the radio (and trust me, you do NOT want it to be the case that you, the operator, have to secure that license), he is NOT ALLOWED to expose the controls for power, et al, to the end user.
Now, if the driver / firmware (distinction / similarity discussed elsewhere in the thread) is open source, then by definition the controls in question are exposed to the end user. There would be nothing to prevent an end user from operating his card at a higher than legal power, or outside the legal freqs for the local regulatory domain.
NOW, all that being said, that is not to say that SOME hardware manufacturers haven't tried to do the right thing, and strike a compromise.
The MAD-WiFi Project http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi, (FAQ here) produces an open driver for the cards with Atheros chipsets. The bulk of the code is open, and under a good license. To meet the FCC requirements, they implement the "required to be secret" controls in a binary-only Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), but the rest of the code is open, free for you to read and modify.
And it works. I'm typing this through a Netgear card, running the MAD-WiFi driver (with TKIP encryption, IEEE 802.11i 4-way handshake and authentication handled by wpa_supplicant) on Gentoo Linux.
Credit is due to Sam Lefler and most importantly to Greg Chesson (of Atheros). Yes, it's that Greg Chesson, the same one mentioned of late by Rob Pike in his recent ./ interview.
Note that, AFAICT, all of this happened without Theo de Raadt pimping around or making an ass of himself, as he is want to do. Disclaimer: I lost patience with Theo and TheoBSD a long time ago.