FSF Certifies Atheros-Based ThinkPenguin 802.11 N USB Adapter

gnujoshua writes "You may recall that last Fall, the LulzBot AO-100 3D printer was awarded the use of the Free Software Foundation's Respects Your Freedom certification mark. Today, the FSF announced certification of the ThinkPenguin TPE-N150USB, Wireless N USB Adapter, which uses the Atheros ARAR9271 chip. The FSF's RYF certification requirements are focused on the software (not the hardware designs) of a product, which in this case was primarily the device firmware and ath9k-htc module in the Linux-libre kernel. (Disclosure: I work for the FSF.) There's also a cool story that is within this story... which is that the firmware for the Atheros AR9271 chipset was released as a result of a small device seller (ThinkPenguin) striking a deal with a large electronic device manufacturer (Qualcomm Atheros) to build a WLAN USB adapter that shipped with 100% free software firmware. This deal was possible largely because two motivated Qualcomm Atheros employees, Adrian Chadd and Luis Rodriguez, made the internal-push to get the firmware released as free software."

Comments

Re:Yeah, but $54 for a USB Wifi?

[Arker]

Freedom isnt about cheap and it never was.

A dongle that 'just works' today with a particular binary wont necessarily work tomorrow on a different machine or after a simple recompile with different options, let alone after a major software upgrade.

At the moment this appears to be the only properly supported wireless dongle on the market. It should be no surprise it's a little more expensive than the junk.

Re:Yeah, but $54 for a USB Wifi?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap Wifi dongles are very problematic and have a history of issues as alantus suggests. Having a completely open Wifi dongle is a Very Good Thing (tm) as many (or all) of these issues will be moot. Plus, if something stops working correctly the device firmware is out there to troubleshoot.

Re:Yeah, but $54 for a USB Wifi?

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

If I can spend 10% and it works, I'm happy.

http://dx.com/p/ultra-mini-nano-usb-2-0-802-11n-b-g-150mbps-wi-fi-wlan-wireless-network-adapter-black-71905

Therefore, I am happy.

Enjoy your purity. I'll enjoy my $48.60 in leftover money.

Re:Yeah, but $54 for a USB Wifi?

[Arker]

Sure, there's a point to buying quality hardware, but at the same time, why is buying a $54 dongle and keeping it for a long time better than buying a $20 one today and buying an improved one for $20 sometime in the future.

Primarily because doing so sends a clear signal to suppliers that we ARE willing to pay extra to get something done right.

Secondarily because buying the "improved one" should be done on my timescale and for my reasons, not forced because I have a piece of junk that wont work properly.

This isn't 2004, you really don't have to search for laptops/wireless dongles that support Linux, its a rarity if they don't support Linux.

To the contrary, although it is not 2004 and some things have improved, I still count one single dongle that actually supports GNU/Linux properly. One.

Supporting one or many binary distributions of GNU/Linux does not constitute proper support. Meeting the criteria for this particular certification does.

Re:Yeah, but $54 for a USB Wifi?

[adri]

The people that want to do dirty hacks, like mesh or TDMA offload on the USB NIC.

Or even improved hostap support.

Or an experimental platform for ${THING_YOU_HAVENT_THOUGHT_OF_YET}.

Yes, you can buy cheaper NICs. Same as buying cheaper anything. But here's a USB NIC with a well-understood wifi part (AR9285 on-die) and now open firmware with open tools to fiddle with the thing. If the FSF and manufacturers manage to ship a million units, great. I'm happy just knowing that people are doing interesting stuff with it. Doubly so if I haven't thought of it yet. Triply so if it's cool and turns out to be transferrable to the other Atheros wifi hardware out there.

Re:Why is it so very last-generation?

[Arker]

Unfortunately, at the moment, the manufacturers perceive the proprietariness of their products as a value. You see how much this costs as is?

But it's real. Every bit is there, driver, firmware, documentation. This thing will be supported as long as there is one old hacker that has one and doesnt like to replace a working part.

And honestly, I know, I like having the latest and greatest when I can too, but can you please quit shitting on those less fortunate? USB 1.1 is 12mbps and there are a lot of people trying to work on less than that. I have the best service available in my area and it would not be a bottleneck in my system. (Not that I run critical systems on wireless anyway, it's ethernet, but if I needed to run something wireless the USB 1.1 throughput limit wouldnt slow me down.)

Last years tech fully and truly available is infinitely better than this years tech locked away where I can never see it, even if I did supposedly buy the hardware. And hopefully this will lead to the manufacturers starting to figure this stuff out and doing more of it.

Re:Yeah, but $54 for a USB Wifi?

[idontgno]

Here's irony: the difference between the $20 dongle you bought and threw away and the $20 dongle you replaced it with (and the next $20 dongle you buy to obsolete the second one) may just be in firmware. Firmware that, if you'd paid the money up-front, you could have flashed from open-source repositories and had the exact same features... for $0 extra.

BTW, the entire premise that you have to constantly, obsessively, upgrade hardware is foolish. Just thought you should know.