Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 30 Jul 2006 10:53:05 -0400 | From | Theodore Tso <> | Subject | Re: ipw3945 status |
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On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 03:01:17PM +0200, Kasper Sandberg wrote: > > Because it would involve a moderate rewriting of the driver, and we'd > > have to carry a delta against Intel's code forever. > > without knowing this for sure, dont you think that if a largely changed > version of the driver appeared in the tree, intel may start developing > on that? cause then they wouldnt be the ones that "broke" compliance > with FCC(hah) by not doing binaryonly.
It's just as likely that their lawyers would tell them that they would have to pretend that the modifications don't exist at all, and not release any changes for any driver (like OpenBSD's) that bypassed the regulatory daemon. The bigger worry would be if they decided that they couldn't risk supporting their current out-of-tree driver, and couldn't release Linux drivers for their softmac wireless devices in the future.
Personally, I don't see why the requirement of an external daemon is really considered that evil. We allow drivers that depend on firmware loaders, don't we? I could imagine a device that required a digitally signed message (using RSA) with a challenge/response protocol embedded inside that was necessary to configure said device, which is calculated in userspace and then passed down into the kernel to be installed into the device so that it could function. Do we really want to consider that to be objectionable?
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