[conspire] "madwifi" is proprietary sludge (was: driver)

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:54:22 -0700, Rick Moen wrote:

> 2.  But why not, by the way?  Atheros's absence of cooperation
>     with the open source community has made necessary a lengthy 
>     reverse-engineering process, and its probably consciously
>     dishonest public statements on the subject have probably confused the 
>     situation and delayed a proper remedy.
> 
> 
>> Until very recently, the Intel chipset you're so hot on worked only
>> with the aid of ndiswrapper and the like.
> 
> And your point is?  It was the development of open source drivers that
> made that difference.

Seems to me you've just answered your own question. There are very
obviously two stages in the status of hardware whose manufacturers are
less than cooperative, such as Intel and Atheros:
1) No open-source drivers in existence.
2) Existence of open-source drivers developed to support the hardware.
Some hardware (especially printers) will never reach stage 2, but
getting hardware owners to exchange their stage 1 hardware for stage 2
stuff only serves to homogenize hardware markets and discourage
open-source driver development efforts like the ipw2200 driver you now
enjoy.