linux-kernel - Re: [otus-devel] Release of Atheros 802.11n USB Linux driver

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Message-ID: <20081028151822.GA8783@kroah.com>
Date:	Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:18:22 -0700
From:	Greg KH <greg@...ah.com>
To:	Joerg Albert <jal2@....de>
Cc:	"Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@...il.com>,
	"otus-devel@...ts.madwifi-project.org" 
	<otus-devel@...ts.madwifi-project.org>,
	"linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org" <linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux-Kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Luis Rodriguez <Luis.Rodriguez@...eros.com>,
	Johannes Berg <johannes@...solutions.net>
Subject: Re: [otus-devel] Release of Atheros 802.11n USB Linux driver

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 02:24:02PM +0100, Joerg Albert wrote:
> On 10/28/2008 12:35 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
>
>> This is now fixed on the master branch, also the branch "for-upstream"
>> does a lot of cleanup I thought you may like before stuffing it into
>> staging like removing all KERNEL_VERSION checks, all wireless
>> extensions checks, some compile warnings, removal of compat, dos2unix,
>> use utf-8, etc. Unfortunately this still requires a specific version
>> of wpa_supplicant but it seems it works. Not sure what bars you have
>> for staging at this point.
>
> I was a bit disappointed to find binary-only firmware inside the driver 
> (HalPlus/OTUS_FB50/{hpfwbu,hpfwuinit}.c which is downloaded into the device 
> during startup (initially thought this to be a complete OpenSource driver 
> :-(

Binary firmware for a device does make the driver still "open source"
except for how some people intrepret it.

It is legal from a kernel standpoint though, and so it is fine to add to
the kernel as-is.

> Unless the attitude towards binary chunks inside the Linux kernel have 
> changed, I guess these should be moved into userspace using the 
> firmware_class driver to access it.

Yes they should, patches gladly accepted :)

thanks,

greg k-h
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