Broadcom wifi drivers in F-14?

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 11:05 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:

> The Broadcom position seems to be entirely crack-inspired, if it's based
> on the notion that a binary driver cannot be modified to break the
> regulations. That assumption is demonstrably false.

In the lawyers' defense, lots of things happen in courtrooms which apear
crack-inspired to those of us who aren't part of the legal process (and,
frequently, also to those who are). I could certainly see a creative
lawyer trying to argue that a driver under an open source license
implicitly encourages modification of the relevant code, while a driver
under a closed source license implicitly discourages it or even
explicitly prohibits it (I haven't checked, but the closed source
drivers may be shipped with a license which claims to prohibit end-user
modification). And I could see a crack-inspired judge agreeing. This is
the kind of crap lawyers have to think of.

(I agree that it would have been an awful lot simpler to just limit the
hardware, but then they'd have to make variants of the hardware for all
different markets, since the range of allowed/required frequencies
differs around the world).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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