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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."
My company develops embedded devices and computer peripherals.
An employee suggested to me that we open-source our drivers for a few offices here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of OSS instead of closed-source. So I decided to let him open source 2 drivers to see how the linux coders got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using OSS in his PC and it seemed to work fine, why not try it with our drivers?
Once he'd got the hardware up and running with the new drivers we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: OSS was a pretty good replacement for telling users we didn't support Linux, and our developers could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received. Developers could not do things they were used to (like leave comments about errata) or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with closed source, such as enable hidden features as selling points. The constant harrasment by the Linux zealots became more of a day job than my own. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when the kernel suddenly exploded and corrupted his software.
Needless to say, the Linux team offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee remove Linux from the offices and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
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?