The ipw3945 project [LWN.net]

The ipw3945 project

Posted Mar 2, 2006 11:33 UTC (Thu) by gypsumfantastic (guest, #31134)
In reply to: The ipw3945 project by eskild
Parent article: The ipw3945 project

That's all very well, but one might hope that "we" could be trusted, or at least the distros and kernel devs could be trusted by Intel, not to screw around with the spectrum in this way.

Still, if there are regulatory and contractual reasons why Intel cannot release the source from this code, providing it notably as a user-space daemon with an implicit "please us strace to provide a GPL replacement" seems a neat little hack around these restrictions.

I assume that issue of microkernel blobs being distributed with (not LINKED with) the kernel is now a non-issue? Except maybe Debian, I dunno.

Intel are playing pretty nicely on the driver front of late, wireless and graphics, and are to be commended, up to a point. No, I'm not gonna get all Stallman on anybody's ass. Sometimes a sense of pragmatism should prevail, and when it comes to having a working wireless, I'm prepared to make that concession.

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The ipw3945 project

Posted Mar 2, 2006 14:55 UTC (Thu) by kmccarty (subscriber, #12085) [Link]

I assume that issue of microkernel blobs being distributed with (not LINKED with) the kernel is now a non-issue? Except maybe Debian, I dunno.

Even in Debian, people appear to be perfectly happy to include these firmware binary blobs in non-free, as long as the license to distribute them makes sense. (For instance, a binary blob licensed under GPL is useless since the GPL specifically requires such binaries to be accompanied with "the complete corresponding machine-readable source code" when distributed. A BSD-type license would be OK though.) The only major remaining issue seems to be how to make these non-free packages available to the Debian Installer in cases where they are needed by required hardware.

The ipw3945 project

Posted Mar 2, 2006 21:22 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I'm amused by the idea of having it on the card's driver disk. I mean, it has to be there for the Windows drivers, and they could just split it out into a separate file in some useful standard format (like ihex). Of course, that's kind of annoying (since you'd have to swap CDs mid-install), but I like the idea of needing a binary file that can be used on any platform, architecture, etc.