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Clearance For New Linux Wireless Driver
An anonymous reader writes "The Software Freedom Law Center has given legal clearance to OpenHAL, a wireless component for Linux, based on their pro-bono review of the code. This announcement dispels allegations of infringement on Atheros' proprietary HAL software. 'We believe that this outcome will clear the way for eventual acceptance of a new wireless driver into the Linux kernel,' said John Linville, the Linux kernel maintainer for wireless networking."
Now if only we could get something decent for Broadcom hardware....
And of course any review must also be judged on the merits of those who stand behind it. In this case the Software Freedom Law Center which has Eben Moglen as chairman (just in case you missed who that guy is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen). I'd probably trust what SFLC says more than what most corporations says.
I half-agree, half-disagree here :-)
On one hand, if you are going to buy some piece of hardware, by all means prefer FOSS-friendly products: less trouble for you and a nudge to the market in the right direction. On the other hand, if you already own a fully functional but non FOSS-friendly equipment, why be wasteful? Reverse-engineering and/or demanding FOSS support are legitimate ways to put pressure in the market too.
^[:q!
Fully functional hardware is readily available and cheap
Is there a regularly-updated list around, anywhere, of what wireless hardware is well supported under particular distributions, and whether it has drivers in the kernel, or from some additional source, or requires binary blobs?
The problem I've always had is that whenever I go to a store to buy a WL card, there are always 10 different ones on the shelves, none of which I've ever heard of, and I can never find any of the supposedly-compatible ones around.
It's not hard to find reports where people will say "oh, yeah, my FOO3549 works perfectly, right out of the box!" but then if you try to go to a store and buy a FOO3549, you'll find out it was discontinued six months ago and replaced with the FOO3649, which uses some totally different, highly proprietary chipset, that there's no support for. (Heck, sometimes they don't even bother to change the model numbers.)
This isn't entirely the fault of Linux or any of the OSS driver developers, but it is a major fucking pain in the ass to buy Linux-compatible wireless cards, and I have a stack of incompatible ones sitting around as a testament to this. I've basically given up -- finally I realized that wireless internet was more frustration than it's worth, and I bought a 500' spool of CAT-5e plenum cable and started drilling holes throughout my house. At least running cables feels like a solvable problem. (Hint: the easiest way to run Ethernet between floors is to route it through the heating ducts...particularly if your walls are all insulated.)
But as far as I know, there's no good centralized repository of information concerning the compatibility of different models, or even of which models have which chipsets. It's all scattered around the internet in a dozen different wikis and forums.
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