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The Battle for Wireless Network Drivers
An anonymous reader points out this Jem Matzan article "about the pain Linux and BSD programmers have in trying to obtain/write device drivers for various wireless cards," writing: This article also has a fairly detailed explanation of how wireless firmwares and drivers work. Two of the manufacturers are actively working with the FOSS community without requiring an NDA."
The two companies are Ralink and Amtel.
No, lack of drivers is a product of Microsoft's dominance. Vendors didn't inherently go with Microsoft because they were Microsoft (Before they started being used on every desktop). Microsoft is now the dominant OS therefore vendors will release drivers especially for windows. Ever look at an AMD chip in the plastic? It says Designed for XP, same for 90% of the graphics cards made for PCs today. I think that the only way to have a level playing field with the drivers are for the vendors to open the code of the driver (NOT the firmware as some douchebags will want you to think) and/or give out some clear or semi-clear documentation on how the computer should interact with the device. OpenBSD has made leaps and bounds on doing this and stay committed. In fact they have excellent wireless support, especially since they love to be technically correct with code/security etc. Open source operating systems lack the back door business deals that make this easier to accomplish but it is a hell of a lot better than it was back in 1999. Win-modems anyone?
Turn based strategy game that runs over XMPP. Phalanx
According to the article, there are three companies that have actually worked with the free software community on drivers. Here is the list:
Ralink Technology
Atmel Corporation
Realtek Linux drivers here
Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.
If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I set up a wiki a while ago in order to track hardware that does not work with Linux and that you should avoid:
http://www.leenooks.com/
It's going pretty well and seems to have become popular enough in its niche that it's not just me maintaining it, and it (almost) pays for the hosting, with adsense.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
I've been there on the other side of a situation like this at a large European based semiconductor manufacturer.
Basically, the real 'motivation' for not supporting this kind of stuff is usually corporate inertia and bureaucracy. 99% of the time there is no IP really to protect. However, 'the system' slaps an NDA on everything by default and although field application engineers and tech. marketing are be assigned to the visible customers theres no-one officially tasked with supporting sales-via-FOSS. Result: even if there's goodwill (which is surprisingly often) nothing happens.
It is absolutely normal for the Intel's of this world to simultaenously pay people to evangelise and support FOSS whilst at the same time product-divisions stone-wall. There are simply other (internal) agendas at work than getting the product out. In short-hand: not related to this years' job objectives? No action! No bonus or visibility? Spare-time effort only.
I think it is noticeable that the businesses that responded effectively in the case of the Wireless drivers were the smaller, hungrier, more genuinely market/customer driven operations.
Fortunately, in the longer-term the Marvell's of this world do tend to rip the lazy corps. a new one even in more conventional customer relationships. The underlying culture of an organisation (genuinely customer driven or just talk) *will* show through. Alas it's a slow process...
Andrew