Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer Source Is Released 117
chrb writes "With the recent discussion here on proprietary blobs in the Linux kernel, it's nice to see that today Sam Leffler has released the source for the Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer under the ISC license, which is both GPL and BSD compatible. The Atheros chipset is used in many laptops, so this is another important step towards running a completely free distribution."
Re:Free OS, free movies (Score:2, Insightful)
Because those movies are shit? Your local library has a better selection of Hollywood titles than the site you reference. Most of these have never been in circulation, and for a very good reason.
Not to mention some of the movies on this site are in formats that are not "free and open" like Linux. AVI, DIVX, MPEG4? Hell, one I looked at was itself a 4 gig ISO file of MPEG2 video. How far must one dig through the site before finding the OGG format videos?
Re:Working sleep mode? (Score:4, Insightful)
It means that community developers will be able to write a driver that works as well in any OS as the Windows one, in every way.
It means all those Linux netbooks that were sold with cheap Aths, will soon have completely robust, standards-compliant wireless. And all those sniffing network-trickery programs that the haxors love, will Just Work(tm). And development can proceed with mesh networking on a much wider scope.
Re:Well, this should brighten up Theo's day... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. If you remove someone else's name and add your own, that's plagiarism, not theft.
2. If you remove someone else's license, and the license doesn't give you permission to do that, that's copyright infringement, not theft.
3. If you add a new license and list yourself as an author, and the old license didn't give you permission to do that, that's copyright infringement, not theft.
4. If you don't enforce your copyright, that's nothing. Copyright gives you the right to sue, if you punt, that's your choice, stop moaning.
Re:Working sleep mode? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, there is a larger team working on madwifi than just Sam, and the kernel team is working on ath5, so I don't think you're right this time.
There is another reason to expect this to result in a code improvement. The same netbooks that have the Atheros wifi often have Intel 3D as part of the chipset. Intel 3D is known to be horrible on Windows. Part of the problem is that desktop vendors don't want Intel 3D to be good, because they want to sell graphics cards. So, Intel has little incentive to make it better.
Except under X, that is. As far as I can tell, it works great under X. The X team at Intel is either not bothered with marketing hold-back; or because the source is public or satisfies a server market, they can justify a need for quality.
ATI will improve over time, and they will probably drive most of it themselves. Open Source will help them do that.
Bruce
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
This is interesting, as there are three Atheros drivers, all different. Madwifi uses the HAL. Ath5 is in the Linux trunk and doesn't (I think). Ath9 was developed by Atheros and probably uses the HAL but I didn't check.
I dont quite get the point of this then TBH, i mean it is nice to open source their code, but given that it has pretty much been reverse engineered already, isn't it a bit late!?
UK does have software patents (Score:3, Insightful)
I really wish people would stop repeating this myth that the UK (and Europe) are free of software patents. There many, many software patents here - you just have to write the patent in a certain way that gets around the very weak restrictions. See http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.html [ffii.org] for sample of these patents with summaries, from an anti-patent group.
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
I had to recompile the kernel using the latest 7.1 source snapshot to get the Atheros card working. The link/activity light doesn't work (no big deal, really!), but the wireless connection 'kill switch' on the front of the case works. I haven't tried running it as a WAP yet, but now I want to give it a try! The ath kernel modules in BSD have supported AP mode for some time now; if it doesn't work that way, I may look into porting Sam's code.