In order to get FCC certification the manufacturer must ensure there is no easy way for the user to tune to illegal frequencies. Broadcom has done their job - it was not easy to reverse engineer their driver. Now the cat is out of the bag. The open source driver is not illegal - although it may be illegal to use it - since the chipset and driver were likely certified together. I'm no expert in FCC regulation, so take all of this with a pinch of salt.
Simon -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Buesch Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 3:46 PM To: Ben Greear Cc: David Hollis; John W. Linville; Samuel Ortiz; netdev@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: wireless-2.6 status (25 January 2006) On Friday 27 January 2006 00:10, you wrote: > Michael Buesch wrote: > > On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 11:04 -0800, Ben Greear wrote: > > > >>If someone has a reverse-engineered HAL that might could be used as > >>well. > > > > > > From a quick look at the HAL asm code (mips-le), I think symbol > > names are obfuscated. So reverse engineering is Not Easy (tm). > > No doubt. It also may be illegal (IANAL) to provide an open-source > HAL in the US due to FCC restrictions because it gives users an easy > way to screw up frequencies not legally available to them. That seems > to be the primary reason why it is binary-only in the first place. Uhm, So in your opinion the bcm43xx driver is illegal in the US, because you can modify bcm43xx_radio_selectchannel() to tune to illegal freqs? I don't know the law, but I doubt that. IMHO it is not the software, which does illegal things, but the _user_, which tunes to these freqs. -- Greetings Michael. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
