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Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer Source Is Released
chrb writes "With the recent discussion here on proprietary blobs in the Linux kernel, it's nice to see that today Sam Leffler has released the source for the Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer under the ISC license, which is both GPL and BSD compatible. The Atheros chipset is used in many laptops, so this is another important step towards running a completely free distribution."
It means that community developers will be able to write a driver that works as well in any OS as the Windows one, in every way.
It means all those Linux netbooks that were sold with cheap Aths, will soon have completely robust, standards-compliant wireless. And all those sniffing network-trickery programs that the haxors love, will Just Work(tm). And development can proceed with mesh networking on a much wider scope.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
1. If you remove someone else's name and add your own, that's plagiarism, not theft.
2. If you remove someone else's license, and the license doesn't give you permission to do that, that's copyright infringement, not theft.
3. If you add a new license and list yourself as an author, and the old license didn't give you permission to do that, that's copyright infringement, not theft.
4. If you don't enforce your copyright, that's nothing. Copyright gives you the right to sue, if you punt, that's your choice, stop moaning.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Right now, there is a larger team working on madwifi than just Sam, and the kernel team is working on ath5, so I don't think you're right this time.
There is another reason to expect this to result in a code improvement. The same netbooks that have the Atheros wifi often have Intel 3D as part of the chipset. Intel 3D is known to be horrible on Windows. Part of the problem is that desktop vendors don't want Intel 3D to be good, because they want to sell graphics cards. So, Intel has little incentive to make it better.
Except under X, that is. As far as I can tell, it works great under X. The X team at Intel is either not bothered with marketing hold-back; or because the source is public or satisfies a server market, they can justify a need for quality.
ATI will improve over time, and they will probably drive most of it themselves. Open Source will help them do that.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.