Why is hotplug disabled when loading network modules

[Jean-Rene Cormier <jean-rene cormier cipanb ca>]

Hi, I have a laptop with an Intel Pro Wireless 2100 card and I'm using
the ipw2100 driver which loads the firmware through hotplug and was
wondering why the firmware wasn't getting loaded at boot time. Someone
on the IPW2100-devel list mentioned that hotplug was getting disabled in
the is_available function in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/network-functions and looking at that
file I can see that I have these lines which do disable it:

    HOTPLUG=`cat /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug`
    echo "/bin/true" > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
    modprobe $1 > /dev/null 2>&1 || {
      echo "$HOTPLUG" > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
      return 1
    }
    echo "$HOTPLUG"  > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug

Why is hotplug disabled when loading the module? And what should be the
"proper way" of loading the firmware?

Jean-Rene Cormier