Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Driver for Linux

Posted Jun 13, 2004 16:56 UTC (Sun) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

This project (IPW2200) is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available).

Oh come on. That's just stupid. They don't really expect us to believe, surely, that not even Intel has access to the hardware docs for the chip they are selling to the laptop vendors. They don't really expect us to believe that they wrote this driver by reverse-engineering their own hardware.

So they want community participation, do they? They want us to sit here wasting our time trying to figure out how the hardware works using the driver source, and guessing about how it probably works differently in cases where the driver is buggy. They would never expect that of paid employees - it would be a massivly inefficient way to do development. Yet they have the nerve to tell us, whom they don't have to pay, that they don't mind wasting our time in an easily avoidable way.

The only reason not to publish PDFs of their wireless chips and circuits is to keep such information away from non-NDA'd prying eyes - either for competitive reasons or regulatory (FCC) reasons. Yet publishing open source code would seem to defeat this goal. You can't have it both ways: either the source is clear enough to engage the hacking community, or it's not. If it is, then they can't deter competitors or FCC regulation violators from getting all they need to know. If not, their "community effort" is a sham.

Sure, there are ways one can improve a driver without a datasheet. Just as there are ways one can hack on code without a compiler. It's still awfully arrogant to expect us to help them do their jobs (and yes, writing drivers is the responsibility of the hardware vendor) under these conditions.