NDISwrapper dodges another bullet [LWN.net]

NDISwrapper dodges another bullet

Posted Mar 5, 2008 18:20 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
Parent article: NDISwrapper dodges another bullet

Policy document sounds useful. Just as something to avoid flamewars. Probably treat it as a
sort of secondary 'soft' license that is not enforced, but is expected to be followed unless
you have a very good reason not to.

As far as the NDIS wrapper goes.. it is indeed horrific. I see people routinely recommend to
users to blacklist open source drivers so that they can get ndiswrapper working, rather then
put the effort into trying to solve the problem. Just search around Ubuntu's forums and you'll
see what I mean.  It's a sort of a new rehash of a old quote.. You have a problem because the
default driver isn't working, so you try to get NDISwrapper working.. now you have two
problems.

Even here at work I had one clueless guy actually install ndiswrapper in a production machine
because he didn't bother to find the perfectly working open source driver.

But I don't see it as a license violation.. I mean as a end user I am under zero restrictions
under the GPL. If I want to funnel all the closed source binary code in the world into the
kernel nobody has any ability to tell me I can't, according to the license.  It's simply
implimenting a driver-level API, which is common thing to have in other operating systems.

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NDISwrapper dodges another bullet

Posted Mar 5, 2008 20:27 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

"""
You have a problem because the default driver isn't working, so you try to get NDISwrapper
working.. now you have two problems.
"""

Well, sometimes there truly is little choice. My laptop has a Broadcom 4318 chip set. B43
works now. But for the first year or so that I had it, no FOSS driver would work. I tried
and tried. I spent hours... days... to no effect. I even went to far as to order an intel
minipci card to replace the broadcom. But the bios on this machine checks the model number
and politely refuses to boot if the wireless card is not on the approved list. So I ended up
with ndiswrapper which was a piece of cake to install and get working. (Hacking the bios, and
possibly trashing my machine, was beyond the limit of what I was willing to do to run a Free
driver, much as I did want to.)

And yes, I did complain loudly to Broadcom and Compaq, but the responses I got made it pretty
clear that they didn't get many complaints, and didn't really even understand what I was
complaining about. I think the Broadcom guy thought I was some kind of kook, not running
Windows.

Linux is wireless driver deficient and has been for a long time. That is, in part, the kernel
devs fault because the old interface was so bad. And it is mostly the chip manufacturers'
fault. But I can't really see blaming the users. If it is common practice to suggest
blacklisting the OSS driver in favor of ndiswrapper, that is because of shortcomings in
*Linux*, not in the user. You can't blame people for wanting common hardware to work. Would
you rather have them running ndiswrapper on Linux? Or go back to Windows?

NDISwrapper dodges another bullet

Posted Mar 5, 2008 21:47 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

""Well, sometimes there truly is little choice. ""

If you have no choice, then you have no choice.

What I have a problem with is people, posing as experts, recommending to new users to
blacklist open source drivers to get NDIS wrapper working.

This is when I have the same exact devices and they are working perfectly well with no NDIS
wrapper!

What they should do instead is figure out what went wrong, file a bug report, and get a
working driver and try to get that stuff back into the distro, or at least provide a download,
so that they are actually helping the people they are claiming to help instead of advising
users to try to shoehorn Windows drivers into their kernel.

NDISwrapper dodges another bullet

Posted Mar 5, 2008 22:51 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Users who believe such "experts" are usually not good at bug reporting. They would forget to provide important information about their systems, they would be loaded with incorrect assumptions taken from "experts" in "helpful" forums, they would fail to read the documentation, they would trust obsolete posts they find on Google more than the current documentation. And even if they manage report a bug more or less correctly, it would be either a known issue, or something already fixed in the git repository and being on its way to the distros. But it's unlikely such users would bother testing the fix.

In any case, it's unfair to advocate blocking free software just because it has some clueless proponents. Just because, say, KDE has some idiotic fans, it doesn't mean that developers of other software (e.g. gcc, libc) should be actively looking for ways to prevent KDE from compiling or working properly, and it particular blacklist KDE modules by name, as it was done to ndiswrapper.

NDISwrapper dodges another bullet

Posted Mar 6, 2008 5:45 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

What I found really annoying was people (yes, on the Ubuntu forums) who told a user, as you
said, to blacklist the free driver in favor of ndiswrapper.  However, the system in question
happened to be using a *PowerPC processor*.  Obviously this will not do the user much good, to
load a Windows driver in this case...