"We, the MadWifi team, announce our decision to move away from the binary-only HAL and change the focus of our future development towards ath5k, a completely free (as in freedom) driver which will eventually become an integral part of the Linux kernel," Michael Renzmann posted to the MadWifi development mailing list. The decision comes during continued debate surrounding what is and what is not allowed by the BSD license, and with no official statement yet from the SFLC. Much of the debate was due to an attempt to release BSD licensed files under the GPL, visible for example in the ath5k_hw.c source file which is still labeled as available "under the terms of the GNU General Public License" in the latest version of the file checked into the source repository linked from the MadWifi project page. It appears that actual development of the ath5k driver has been moved to Linville's git tree, where the license is now purely BSD, though debate remains as to what's required to be able to add additional copyrights to source code as have been added to the reverse engineered HAL code originally written by Reyk Floeter. In an earlier confrontation with Atheros, the work done by Reyk was determined to be free of copyright infringement:
"A driver for Atheros wireless cards is available in OpenBSD that talks directly to the hardware, based on reverse engineering efforts done by Reyk Floeter. Relevant parts of the driver have been ported to Linux by Nick Kossifidis to start OpenHAL, a free (as in freedom) replacement of the proprietary HAL. Claims that the OpenBSD driver (and thus also OpenHAL) contains stolen code slowed down the OpenHAL efforts but finally could be voided. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), with the help of Atheros, performed a thorough code review and concluded "that OpenHAL does not infringe copyrights held by Atheros". In other words, the way is clear now for the inclusion of an OpenHAL-based driver into the Linux kernel."
From: Michael Renzmann <mrenzmann@...>
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] MadWifi project moves away from binary-only HAL in favor of ath5k
Date: Sep 20, 10:58 am 2007
Hi all.
We, the MadWifi team, announce our decision to move away from the
binary-only HAL and change the focus of our future development towards
ath5k [1], a completely free (as in freedom) driver which will eventually
become an integral part of the Linux kernel. We encourage all interested
developers to join us and contribute to our efforts.
For those who are not familiar with the concept, the proprietary "Hardware
Abstraction Layer" (HAL) [2] was designed as compromise to allow at least
one Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) wireless driver component. Unlike
many other wireless devices Atheros chipsets can use a wide range of
frequencies and the host software can control many aspects of the radio.
Regulatory agencies all over the world have laws which restrict the use of
the wireless spectrum to certain frequency bands under specific
transmission power levels. These laws drive wireless manufacturers to come
up with solutions to enforce compliance with the wide array of regulatory
agencies. The binary HAL is a wrapper around all chipset registers, and
all direct hardware access is routed through it. This approach ensures
that non-compliant settings are not applied to the radio, while allowing
the open source part of the driver to interact with the chipset in a
permissive manner.
We understand Atheros' reasons for introducing the HAL and distributing it
in binary form only, and we supported it. But this decision forced us to
deal with a black box that we could neither fix nor fully understand - a
major issue for a free software project. This prevented MadWifi from
appearing in many Linux distributions. Because of the proprietary HAL and
since the MadWifi driver also did not make use of the new mac80211 layer
in Linux it has been impossible for it to become part of the Linux kernel.
It's also been clear to us that the "security through obscurity" approach
won't work to protect the hardware against unlawful use. Regardless, we
kept working on MadWifi as no acceptable alternative existed.
This situation has changed.
A driver for Atheros wireless cards is available in OpenBSD that talks
directly to the hardware, based on reverse engineering efforts done by
Reyk Floeter. Relevant parts of the driver have been ported to Linux by
Nick Kossifidis to start OpenHAL [3], a free (as in freedom) replacement
of the proprietary HAL. Claims that the OpenBSD driver (and thus also
OpenHAL) contains stolen code slowed down the OpenHAL efforts but finally
could be voided. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) [4], with the help
of Atheros, performed a thorough code review and concluded "that OpenHAL
does not infringe copyrights held by Atheros" [5]. In other words, the way
is clear now for the inclusion of an OpenHAL-based driver into the Linux
kernel.
Another important development is the work on a "central regulatory domain
agent". It aims to ensure compliance with the regulatory constraints and
rules based on the current location of the user. The agent and its
integration with the kernel will allow wireless LAN drivers to enforce
local regulations without requiring non-free software for that task. This
work will soon be published for merging with the upstream kernel.
We now see a road to move away from the binary-only HAL; it's no
comfortable road, however, and thus requires full concentration of our
resources to finally reach the ultimate goal of getting a free driver for
Atheros devices into the Linux kernel. This free driver is called ath5k,
and the work on it has already been started. We are also in contact with
Atheros to encourage them to support these efforts.
To underline our decision and commitment to ath5k we now declare MadWifi
"legacy.". In the long run ath5k will replace the MadWifi driver. For the
time being MadWifi will still be supported, bugs will get fixed and HAL
updates will be applied where possible. But it becomes unlikely that we'll
see new features or go through major changes on that codebase. The only
exception to this is the work spent on improved support for Dynamic
Frequency Selection (DFS) [6], which is used for avoiding interference
with radars.
Users who need stable and solid WLAN support for their Linux computers
should stick with MadWifi for now. Interested parties are welcome to try
ath5k and any constructive feedback is highly appreciated.
We encourage developers to contribute [7] to the free driver efforts -
it's still a long way before we reach the goal of a truly free Atheros
driver for Linux, and every helping hand is welcome.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks for listening.
-- The MadWifi Team
Links:
[1] http://madwifi.org/wiki/About/ath5k
[2] http://madwifi.org/wiki/About/HAL
[3] http://madwifi.org/wiki/About/OpenHAL
[4] http://softwarefreedom.org/
[5] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/jul/31/openhal/
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11h#DFS_Dynamic_Frequency_Selection
[7] http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ath5k#Hackingath5k
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Cooperation
It is great news that the madwifi developers have seen the light. Hopefully they will continue to cooperate with Reyk and the OpenBSD developers to improve the HAL replacement for both operating systems.
So if I understand this
So if I understand this correctly, they've decided against committing plagiarism and they've actually finally read the BSD license for the whopping 5 seconds that it takes to read and comprehend, and are now following the license terms properly?
No, you do not understand
No, you do not understand this correctly.
The Theo fancrowd has long ago stopped claiming that a dual-licensed piece of code cannot be relicensed under just one of the licenses. Yes, they have accepted that it is in fact legal. And the source code licensed under ISC alone was never really re-licensed.
In fact, the argument has nothing to do with licenses anymore — just whether Nick Kossifidis and Jiri Slaby were justified in adding their names to the copyright header.
Where do you get your facts from?
The Theo fancrowd has long ago stopped claiming that a dual-licensed piece of code cannot be relicensed under just one of the licenses. Yes, they have accepted that it is in fact legal.
Where do you get your facts from? Care to share where you get your info from - specifically where in *one place* can you show where Theo and others agreed that it's ok to just simply remove the BSD license/clause and allow other people to steal the credit.
The issue has *never* been about what you just said, it's been about the Linux guys illegally and/or wrongfully *removing* the BSD license/clause (depending how you look at it) and then trying to steal the credit for OpenBSD's great work and code that they always do in comparison.
I'm really curious to know where or how you jumped to your own conclusions like this.
Re: Where do you get your facts from?
it's been about the Linux guys illegally and/or wrongfully *removing* the BSD license/clause (depending how you look at it) and then trying to steal the credit for OpenBSD's great work and code that they always do in comparison.
Wrong. Neither of these things actually happened.
Jiri has applied the corresponding changes to his personal working copy of ath5k as well as the publically accessible ath5k-branch in the Subversion repository on madwifi.org. He then submitted the patches for peer review to the linux-wireless mailing list, where the patches that tried the relicensing-thing were declined due to legitimate criticism not only from Theo. The criticised changes have been reverted and only a corrected version of these patches have been submitted to one of the official Linux repositories. The same changes have then been applied to the ath5k-branch in the madwifi.org repository.
Not "the Linux guys" made the criticised change, but a single developer. The change has at no time been committed to an official Linux repository. The only public place where the change in question appeared was the madwifi.org repository, where it has been reverted and corrected appropriately.
As far as I can tell it has never been the intention of any developer involved in ath5k to "steal" code or credit from those who contributed to OpenBSD's ar5k. The fact that OpenHAL developers shared patches and bugreports with Reyk (the ar5k author) should speak for itself, proofing these claims wrong.
DFS
i have been working on implementing DFS in madwifi as a research project. I wanted to know how i can include another field in the management frame which will act as a probe from the AP to the STA to send it RSSI from its cache? I also wanted to know how i can recieve and extract this information sent by the STA..My project involves:
*To send a management frame that will probe the reciever for RSSI
*Access the scan cache and encapsulate the data in the reply frame
*evaluate current channel and other channels based on measurement
*announce channel switch broadcast
Any information regarding this would be extremely valuable!
Thanks
Of course..
Of course, the fact that the complete source in question wasn't dual licensed (And this being the *actual* issue) is often ignored by linuxalots. :)
another problem
I wonder, if Linux kernel is GPL or dual(GPL/sth.) and ath5k contains dual(GPL/BSD) parts by Sam Leffler + ISC parts by Reyk Floeter, does it mean that madwifi team will try to introduce non-GPL elements to Linux kernel? I am not trolling, but I think that soon we will have another problem. ISC is not even compatible with GPL and Reyk will never dual license his code with GPL.
>ISC is not even compatible
>ISC is not even compatible with GPL
Please don't spread this nonsense, it is compatible like almost any BSD-like license, apart from the one with the advertising clause. If there is anything not so kosher, it's the behaviour of some Linux guys, stripping the BSD-like license from the code in the beginning.
The GP was certainly misleading....
The ISC license does not seem to be incompatible with the GPL v2 according to any reading of that license I am aware of. The GPLv3 may be another story (read carefully section 7 of the GPL3). So while "GPL compatibility" may be debatable for some versions of the GPL, it is not relevant to the conversation of the Linux kernel since it is under the GPL2.
Regardless of what license
Regardless of what license any of this ends up under, it's nice to see that the they are using an opensource HAL that can be improved and is more then a "black box" to the developers and interested users. This should lead to better quality drivers and possible inclusion into the mainstream kernel.