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 Cc: majid.awad@intel.com Subject: ipw(4) and iwi(4): Intel's Pro Wireless firmware licensing problems Message-ID: <f34ca13c0610041946h7dfaa05cyf3296798b215405e@mail.gmail.com>
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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.
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