[nmglug] wireless pcmcia card

[pi]

Sam Noble wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 14:47 -0600, pi wrote:
> 
>>The driver, or some part thereof, MUST be closed source, because 
>>otherwise the FCC gets nervous that people can modify the card
>>software 
>>to do things it shouldn't, like transmit on out-of-band frequencies.
>>The 
>>hardware on other cards usualy prevents that on other cards.
> 
> 
> FWIW, Intel's IPW2xxx, and the prism54 cards have this exact same issue.
> The 'firmware' can not be Free software because of the FCC et al.
> It 'feels' slightly worse for the atheros cards because the closed code
> is a kernel module rather than a hotplug loaded firmware blob, but AFAIK
> it's essentially the same issue.

As I understand it, the firmware on the Prism54 cards is just the 
"operating system" that just needs to get RAM loaded, after which, the 
card can function on it's own. The atheros cards don't have onboard RAM, 
so they need the host computer to do everything, and it would be easier 
to modify the driver to do illegal things if the Madwifi HAL were open 
sourced.

> Of course the firmware on the older B cards like the Prism2 and Orinoco
> is not any more Free, it's just we think less about it due to it being
> stored in non-volatile onboard chips.