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Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 22:46:23 -0400
From: "Constantine A. Murenin" <mureninc@gmail.com>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
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Cc: majid.awad@intel.com
Subject: ipw(4) and iwi(4): Intel's Pro Wireless firmware licensing problems
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Hi,

My acquaintance with Unix started with FreeBSD, which I used for quite
a while before discovering OpenBSD. I now mostly use OpenBSD, and I
was wondering of how many FreeBSD users are aware about the licensing
restrictions of Intel Pro Wireless family of wireless adapters?

Why are none of the manual pages of FreeBSD say anything about why
Intel Wireless devices do not work by default?

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ipw
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwi

If you are curious as to why things are the way they are, I suggest
that you check the problems that are described in the misc@openbsd.org
mailing list, and contact Intel people and say what you think about
their user-unfriendly policy in regards to Intel Pro Wireless
firmwares, which are REQUIRED to be loaded from the OS before the
device functions, i.e. the OS developers must be allowed to freely
distribute the firmware in order for the devices to work
out-of-the-box.

For some recent information about Intel being an Open Source Fraud,
see http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=115960734026283&w=2.

Cheers,
Constantine.