OpenBSD Activism Shows Drivers Can Be Freed

grey writes "The Age has a story up about how the OpenBSD community has been contacting wireless chipset vendors to license their firmware binaries under terms that would allow for free redistribution. This is important, because even with existing GPL and BSD licensed drivers for these chipsets, the drivers don't function without first loading onerously licensed firmware binaries which can only be acquired from the vendor, not shipped by an OSS provider." (Read more, below.)

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."

Comments

Why NOT?

[TexasDex]

Really. I never understood the reason for such restrictive licenses on drivers. I could distribute the drivers far and wide, but without buying the company's hardware (read: paying them money) they are really really useless.

So why do companies have a problem with free driver distribution?

Re:Why NOT?

[cmowire]

A variety of reasons, and there's probably a bunch more that I'm not aware of:

• Legal counsel decides it's a bad idea because it could expose them to liability
• It really does expose them to liability. For example, you could exceed FCC restrictions on the ISM bands by programming your card to emit more power than it should on frequencies it's not allowed in the US to be in.
• They are selling the same hardware as three different products with only the drivers different.
• You could make a linux-based device cheaper than their stand-alone equivelent.
• There are bits of licensed code in the driver that aren't theirs to give out.
• They are using a reference design and the driver contains features unique to their product. If they let the driver out, people will be able to buy the cheaper implementation of the same reference design and get those features.

Re:Why NOT?

[SydShamino]

Dude, note that this is for FIRMWARE, not drivers. Big difference.

Hardware used to do things using discrete transistors, resistors, diodes, etc. These days most of that (and more) can be done better in high-density logic devices. But the "top of the line" high density logic, ASICs, still have too great a startup cost for many companies. Plus, they cannot be field upgraded.

The next best logic, FPGAs, are not hard-coded with the firmware. Instead, they load it from a memory source on the hardware - or they load it from the operating system on boot or plug-in. The advantage of the latter is that you don't have to pay for the EEPROM or flash to store the firmware on board, and updating the firmware is as simple as downloading a new binary to your computer. (Overwriting EEPROM or flash firmware on hardware can be dangerous, as a failure could prevent the hardware from being recognized to try again.)

So, firmware (i.e. code for the hardware) ships with the software driver, but is separate from it. Your next question will be: Why don't they open-source their firmware, too?

And the answer here is simple. They have to pay someone to design that firmware, lay out the PCB, spec in parts and materials, and then provide hardware to build those units. If their firmware is available to all, then someone else can take that code, copy their PCB, and produce the exact same board except with no overhead of R&D. Heck, they could even provide (under the table) vendor and device information so that it looked exactly like the primary company's product, would work with their driver, etc.

Why would any company want to do that? One of the early competitors of my company, 15 years or so ago when we used TTL parts, copied the entire product exactly. Reverse engineered the PCB. Then ran advertisements showing the two boards side-by-side, explaining how they were identical except that theirs cost less because they have no research overhead.

So, of course, my company leveraged its research "overhead" to produce a better, faster product that also happened to not be so easily copied. This resulted in our first ASIC. There is no way that we or most other existing hardware companies would return to the days where anyone can copy their products.

Re:Why NOT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, this article is about -licensing- the firmware in such a way that it can be shipped by OSS vendors - NOT about Open Sourcing it (quote: "Please remember, we are not asking for the vendors to open source their firmware under the GPL or BSD licenses"). Stop trying to answer a question no one was asking, you're either making yourself look foolish or intentionally misleading people when you do such things.

Anyone who wanted to reverse engineer the firmware would have just as tough a time doing it _now_ as they would if the firmware was able to be shipped on a knoppix or OpenBSD CD instead of downloading it from a website with an Intel licensing splash page.

You have some worthwhile points and you explain the distinction between drivers and firmware well, but your argument and company's experience is not relevant in this instance. Getting companies like TI and Intel to license their firmware in a way that allows for other vendors to provide it out of the box is just going to help users - other companies which might be helped or hindered by open sourced firmware will be completely unaffected, because the challenge will remain the same as it is now.

Let's take that intellect and argumentative skills and point it at contacts for TI and intel instead of veering off course.