On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 9:16 AM, pbrobinson(a)gmail.com <pbrobinson(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: That's up to John to decide, so I added him to CC.

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Jesse Keating <jkeating(a)j2solutions.net&gt; wrote: You are ;) The firmware required is part of linux-firmware (i.e fine to ship).

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:31:44PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: 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. John -- John W. Linville The truth will set you free, but first it will linville(a)redhat.com make you miserable. -- James A. Garfield

On 09/14/2010 08:33 PM, pbrobinson(a)gmail.com wrote: It is nevertheless a massive step forward. I heard OEM systems were favouring other, even slightly more expensive wireless cards because of the poor Linux support from Broadcom in this particular area and their change removes one of the major barriers in the near future. Rahul

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:04:04PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Seriously. I will go buy their stuff right now. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)mattdm.org&gt; Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Stick with HP laptops I've not exactly seen that but I'm not sure if its pertaining to particular models. I know Dell in the past has offered their re branded Broadcom wifi with an option of Intel wifi for a £5 premium. No idea if HP does similar. Peter

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 01:01 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: Ones who pre-load Linux could presumably calculate that shipping a better supported chip may cost them slightly more initially but save them maintenance headaches and hence eventually work out cheaper, so that would be Dell and HP. I think some of their pre-loaded systems do come with Intel chipsets rather than Broadcom, which are indeed slightly more expensive to procure. I haven't directly heard the rumours Rahul had, though. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I'm not denying the massive step forward, its certainly a valued contribution. Peter

Ric Wheeler (rwheeler(a)redhat.com) said: 'No' is what I've been told. Bill

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 09:09:58 -0400, "John W. Linville" <linville(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: How does the firmware know where you are? Do you need different firmware for different markets? I hope the guys that reverse engineered the firmware that can be used as an alternative with the b43 driver keep working on it.

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:13:25AM -0400, John W. Linville wrote: 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

Hi, On 09/14/2010 01:31 PM, David Woodhouse wrote: Hmm, now that they are trying to be opensource friendly, can't we get them to license the old firmware under the same license as the new one? It would be great to be able to ship the old firmware and haver older broadcom cards work out of the box. David do you have a contact inside Broadcom to talk to about this, and could you ask? Regards, Hans

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 08:31 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote: I've asked, but they're scared of it. They seem to think that they could be prosecuted even for *enabling* people to use the open source b43 driver, because you have the possibility of hacking that driver not to conform to the regulatory requirements. Shipping the binary-only firmware with a licence which permits us to distribute it as part of a Linux distribution could be seen as 'enabling' the use of the b43 driver, so they're reluctant to do so. Even if their licence doesn't mention Linux at all, but just allows you to distribute it for use with their hardware in general. The whole thing seems completely nonsensical to me -- it's well known that people reverse-engineer and hack up binary drivers too, so there's nothing stopping those users from breaking the regulations either. There are hacks out there which let you boost the TX power with the binary drivers, for example. If the Broadcom lawyers really do suffer from such paranoid delusions, they should never have shipped hardware which requires *any* software assistance to conform to the law. In the meantime, people are quite happily shipping the 'offending' b43 driver in all parts of the world without hearing *anything* from the authorities. And yet the Broadcom lawyers still seem to cling to their fantasy that a hackable Open Source driver somehow puts them at more risk than a just-as-hackable closed-source driver. Fixing bugs and making other improvements in the closed source driver is much harder than it is in the open driver, of course -- but if all you want to do is remove restrictions on available channels and tweak things like TX power, that's actually fairly easy with the binary drivers. That's why I say 'just as hackable'. It's also much *easier* to distribute such hacks for the binary drivers; it's often just a case of 'zero the byte at 0x5d3 with a hex editor', which is easier for most users than actually patching source code and rebuilding a driver properly. The Broadcom position seems to be entirely crack-inspired, if it's based on the notion that a binary driver cannot be modified to break the regulations. That assumption is demonstrably false. -- dwmw2

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: But where do you draw the line? A "crack-inspired" judge might argue that the fact that regulation is done in software is a problem regardless of the drivers license / nature.

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 13:20 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote: But the specific type of modifications we're talking about are *already* prohibited, by the law of the land. It really doesn't make an iota of difference whether the licence of the software adds extra provisions. The argument you're positing is an argument which could be used against *all* Open Source software -- take fairly much *any* package on a network-connected system and you *could* modify it to do *something* illegal. And then you could argue that its licence implicitly encouraged you to do so... does that mean the original author is responsible? -- dwmw2

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Jon Masters <jonathan(a)jonmasters.org&gt;wrote: ... snip ... FYI. The law in Canada is/was a little different. Your were allowed to listen, but you were not allowed to repeat anything you heard. Thats why you can/could buy un-blocked scanners here. ... at least thats the way it _used_ to be. The issue with WiFi isn't so much the ability to 'listen' to traffic, its the fact that not all 'defined' frequencies that the hardware is capable of using, ARE legally usable in all countries. Now how does a device/laptop 'know' what country its current operating in is another story. Its not as if it has a built-n GPS! :-)

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Jon Masters <jonathan(a)jonmasters.org&gt; wrote: Its not that simple ... they have to comply with the regulatory rules of the countries they ship there products in.

On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 16:53 +0200, drago01 wrote: Yes. But (and I love Canada) the US market is huge, corporations are registered and based here, etc. So all I was saying is that the opinion of the FCC would naturally influence their behavior moreso that that of regulatory bodies in other jurisdictions. If the FCC happened to say they interpreted something one way, it would carry a lot of weight. Anyway. This is off topic now. Jon.