The driver portion is under the GPL and the firmware is not free or not under
the GPL license. You can't utilise this card without the non-free firmware.
This is what they call a binary blob. Not everybody objects to binary blobs
and the mainline kernel developers include such non-free software. Some
drivers include firmware released under the GPL although have obfuscated the
code. In this event it is not free.
The free software community objects to non-free binary blobs and thus
Trisquel does not include it.
I do see some things which imply there may be chipsets that don't require the
firmware to be present to get partial use of some chipsets that use this
driver. However I can't seem to find any chipset where that is the case which
use this driver. They all seem to produce a "firmware not found" message if
the firmware is not present. For instance the RT3572USB depends on the rt2800
firmware I believe.
