Linux: Reverse Engineering Wireless Drivers

Makes you think, does it not? Could OpenBSD actually make sense down the road for the notebook world? After all, it seems that they are already ahead of Linux within the WiFi realm.

Following Andrew Morton [interview]’s overview of what will likely be merged into the 2.6.18 kernel [story], several developers discussed the legality of the ACX1xx wireless driver. Jeff Garzik began the discussion, “I’ve never had technical objections to merging this, just AFAIK it had a highly questionable origin, namely being reverse-engineered in a non-clean-room environment that might leave Linux legally vulnerable.” Andreas Mohr explained that the open source driver was implemented by the same people that reverse engineered a binary-only driver available at one time in some Linux distributions, “this might fail to comply with usual ‘clean-room’ practices (e.g. one party examining a driver and then a separate party implementing a new driver with the data gained from examining the original driver)”…. Source: kerneltrap.org

[tags]wireless,drivers,engineering[/tags]