"In most cases the GNU GPL licensed driver has separate firmware, but in
other cases, like the Ralink drivers that firmware is non-free and embedded
within the free code and thus not really free (and particularly not in any
useful way)."
The drivers on Mediatek website are the old drivers that have the firmware
embedded. The rt2x00 drivers, which were made with the help of Ralink and are
of higher quality, use a separate firmware blob.
I read a quote from a rt2x00 dev who said that, in the case of Ralink, most
things are actually done in the driver, and the firmware only handles what is
really needed. So I guess the situation is better than other chips that
require nonfree firmware.
