Wow?

Wow?

Posted Sep 29, 2008 20:15 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: Wow? by tialaramex
Parent article: Atheros releases ath5k HAL code

We should not care about firmware that doesn't need to be distributed (unless we are trying to improve it or hack the hardware). But we should care about the firmware that needs to be loaded by the host system. That firmware needs to be distributed with the operating system. Operating systems have different policies, which may be incompatible with the license for the firmware. Even if the firmware is allowed to be copied freely, it may still be incompatible with a distro that aims to provide sources for every binary, whether it runs on the host CPU or not.

Atheros cards would satisfy every distribution because no blobs need to be distributed at all. Sure, there are tables for register initialization in the driver, but I don't think anyone would treat them as binary blobs.

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