This sounds great! Moving to OpenHAL should benefit madwifi in many ways. There is only one thing I question: "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." In my opinion, protection should not be in the software for such things. While Atheros may be required by law to do this, madwifi (this is NOT legal advice in any way shape or form) is not required to do so. One comparison which can be made to this situation is that of VLC. Whereas commercial DVD playing apps look at region codes, VLC ignores them. VLC could choose to abide by these codes and put code in to stop the wrong region from playing, but the project chooses not to. Madwifi should do the same. Another comparison is the GPL kernel module debate. The kernel was made to prohibit access to certain symbols for programs which were not GPLd by checking the Module_License to see if it was equal to GPL. Linuxant got around this by setting the Module_License to "GPL\0for files in the \"GPL\" directory; for others, only LICENSE file applies." The null character made this effectively "GPL" so the kernel loaded the proprietary modules as if they were GPL. Now, Linus Torvalds got a bunch of patches to fix this. However, his response was this: "I'd prefer not to do that. Since they want to circumvent this, almost anything we want to do is a waste of time." He too offered a patch, adding to it the byline, "Arms race forces bloat upon module users" [1]. This is the philosophy that madwifi needs to abide by. Don't protect your code from hackers, or people wanting to abuse it. Developers should just focus on making the best Linux Atheros driver possible, and not worry themselves with providing protection against purposefully misusing the software. -- Mike [1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/2991 On 9/20/07, Michael Renzmann <mrenzmann@madwifi.org> wrote:------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Madwifi-devel mailing list Madwifi-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/madwifi-devel
| Andreas Gruenbacher | Re: [AppArmor 39/45] AppArmor: Profile loading and manipulation, pathname matching |
| Alan Cox | Re: [patch 7/8] fdmap v2 - implement sys_socket2 |
| Jens Axboe | Re: regression: CD burning (k3b) went broke |
| Paul E. McKenney | Re: [PATCH 0/24] make atomic_read() behave consistently across all architectures |
git: | |
| KOSAKI Motohiro | [bug?] tg3: Failed to load firmware "tigon/tg3_tso.bin" |
| David Miller | [GIT]: Networking |
| Alexey Dobriyan | [PATCH 09/33] netns ct: per-netns /proc/net/nf_conntrack, /proc/net/stat/nf_conntr... |
| Gerrit Renker | [PATCH 18/37] dccp: Support for Mandatory options |
