On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 7:28 AM, David Willmore <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 3:27 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez <[email protected]> wrote: >> If we want proper upstream drivers we essentially want to help vendors >> with their considerations, and as such we need to respect regulatory >> rules in upstream code. If you want to change rules then you can write >> to your local congressmen, lobby up, etc. Upstream wise we want >> hardware to be supported was was designed, and as best as possible, >> and we take this over some hacked up crap reversed engineered driver. > > This all assumes Part 15 use. What about Part 97? We're a small enough > group that noone is going to make cards specifically for us, though our use > of them is completely legal though it's hindered by the card EPROM and > the regulatory code in the kernel.
Its a good question but to me the answer becomes clearer once you consider regulatory rules for Part 97 and the design of an 802.11 device. IANAL and this is just my opinion but Part 97 *does* require licensed operators, so, IMHO if we wanted to do best effort by the community's part to show we did what we could to help with regulatory considerations we could simply upstream a driver but introduce some sort of registration page or something which would require the user to provide their own Call sign / something to prove they are licensed for downloading a CRDA binary / wireless-regdb which can enable them to use a modified driver for a cheap 802.11 device re-purposed for Part 97. Key is to prevent an average user from repurposing their on commodity radio for something they are not allowed to do. Effort along this area which would show best effort IMHO would enable us as geeks to pave the way for our solutions to actually become models for other OSes and also using the spectrum as efficient as is possible. We're years ahead of current legislation but the model we embrace, specially if done responsibly, can help pave the way for legislation to embrace and help us with our goals on reusing and repurposing RF hardware for alternative means. Luis _______________________________________________ ath9k-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel
