Wireless in FC4

Rodd Clarkson rodd at clarkson.id.au
Wed Mar 9 01:44:37 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 08:09 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> > AFAIK, the only limitation on distributing this is that a copy of the
> > license must be included with the firmware.  This shouldn't stop Fedora
> > distributing the firmware.
> 
> http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/firmware.php?fid=4
> http://kerneltrap.org/node/4202
> 
> Remember, OpenBSD tried and completely failed to get Intel to relicense the 
> firmware under a FOSS-type license so that it was easily distributable.

Okay, finally found time to read this and while frustrating, it sheds
some light on the subject.

There were a lot of mentions of sending email to the people at Intel
responsible for this, but no listing of their email address.  If someone
could supply me with an email address I'm more than happy to harness my
energies and write a polite letter to Intel explaining that while their
wireless technology is very nice, true Linux support can't be achieved
until their firmware is licensed in such a way that it can be included
with the distribution so that clueless end user (which Windows has
plenty of and Linux can look forward too) don't have to know to download
firmware and install it so they can use the hardware, and so that
Intel's claims their wireless hardware supports Linux can actually
become truth (after all, supplying source code for the driver, but not
allowing the firmware to be included with the driver, means that the
driver isn't worth squat. )  True Linux support would include a license
that allows the firmware to be included along with the driver.

I would like to clarify a point before writing this letter.

Is it so that the firmware doesn't need to be freely modifiable, it just
needs to have a license that allows the firmware to be freely
distributed as an image?


Rodd

-- 
>From the pain come the dream
>From the dream come the vision
>From the vision come the people
>From the people come the power
>From this power come the change

                         - Peter Gabriel




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