On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, J�rgen Botz wrote:

> Dan Fitzpatrick wrote:
> > This was announced months ago.
> 
> Yeah, sorry about that.  I've been a bit out of touch for the last
> couple of months.
> 
> > Took them long enough.  I didn't think Sam was working on Linux drivers. 
> > Maybe they really mean FBSD... you know because there's only one real open
> > source OS. (at least in the mind of the masses)
> 
> Any case, they are not real Open Source drivers... apparently
> they're hybrid, with a binary module for hardware layer access.
> Damn.  This because of evil FCC rules... I'm afraid these kinds
> of rules are one of the greatest dangers yet to the future of
> Open Source.

No more like, The atheros chipsets has a number of features which if 
enabled place the chipset outside of it's fcc certification for 
unliscensed use. They (atheros) fear (rightly probably) that if they make 
access to those features available that people will use them. It's sort of 
like handing someone a loaded gun with a trigger lock as saying, "if you 
want to use it call and we'll come over with the keys." eventually someone 
will reverse engineer a version that has all those features or the 
engineering documents will slip out, then there will be frigging 
anarchy...

:( 

The fcc doesn't having anything to do with the software engineering, just 
the overall compliance of the product.
 
> :j
> 
> 
> --
> general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/>
> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
> 

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Joel Jaeggli           Unix Consulting         [EMAIL PROTECTED]    
GPG Key Fingerprint:     5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2


--
general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/>
[un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless

Reply via email to