Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Battle for Wireless Network Drivers

Posted by timothy on from the mind-the-nazgul dept.

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."

1 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What about Intel? by postmortem · · Score: 0, Troll

    I think there are still some binaries used in intel's driver. There's 'regulatory daemon' and 'firmware' for intel 3945ABG cards,and both are required for WiFi card to work. At least firmware is not open source.

    Putting everything as open source hurts companies, because competition gets free reverse engineered sample. And more and more of these devices relies on software side, not on the hardware. Why would they hurt themselves and release source code for minor market?