On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:13:25AM -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:31:44PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 00:40 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > IIRC they require a firmware blob that has a license that we cannot distribute
> > unlike say the Intel firmwares. I could be wrong though.
>
> That's still true of the b43 firmware for older (pre-802.11n) devices,
> but the firmware to go with their new driver is now in
> linux-firmware.git.
>
> Their *original* offering of that new firmware had a stupid licence --
> you could only distribute it if you promised to indemnify and defend
> Broadcom from all related third-party lawsuits. They fixed that though,
> and I merged it.
Nevertheless, everyone I know that has reviewed the newly released
driver code is being treated for eye cancer. I wouldn't expect to
see it in F-14.
My glib statement above seems to have caused a little heartburn
for our friends at Broadcom. To be fair, I do not believe that
the Broadcom-provided driver is substantially any worse than any of
the many other vendor-provided drivers we have seen over the years.
In fact, it seems to have drawn a lot of immediate interest and has
already seen a number of community-provided patches posted.
That said, it is still extremely late for F-14 consideration.
Those interested in seeing this driver in some later F-14 kernel
update or in F-15 or beyond are strongly encouraged to take-up
this driver's cause in getting it migrated from drivers/staging to
drivers/net/wireless in the upstream kernel.
Thanks,
John
--
John W. Linville The truth will set you free, but first it will
linville(a)redhat.com make you miserable. -- James A. Garfield