I can't really take much credit, at least, only part of it. There are a
number of people working on making this happen. The original author of AR9170
driver for instance, and a few outside developers. We are doing some testing
and "pushing it" a bit. I did more of the work on the business end of it (ie
sourcing manufacturing, finding funding for the investment, coordinating a
few things, etc).
Anyway. The kernel itself has the driver already so that is done. It's JUST
the firmware that does not have the code released. This is why Ubuntu already
supports the adapter out of the box and Trisquel (amongst other free software
friendly distributions do not).
Without the code for the firmware there would be no USB N adapter for us to
offer in the near future and quite possibly no USB G adapters either. Both of
the older chipsets are discontinued and retooling the factories for
manufacturing that stuff comes at a huge cost.
