Ben Greear wrote:
Michael Buesch wrote:
On Friday 27 January 2006 00:10, you wrote:
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.
I don't know. The bcm firmware may have a way to keep users from
doing (very) wrong things, as evidently the intel wifi firmware does.
It seems that the Atheros firmware is not smart enough to enforce
enough restrictions.
As to who could be found at fault..I'm not sure. But since all the
rest of madwifi is open-source (and seems to get good support from
Atheros),
I can't really see why they'd close the HAL just for the hell of it.
This issue will come up again and again.
Linux needs to provide functionality a la ieee80211_geo, whereby you can
choose from acceptable frequencies for your location. As Alan Cox has
pointed out, this may be a /etc setting, something that may be
overridden by the AP.
Jeff
-
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
