Broadcom wifi drivers in F-14?

[drago01]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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).

But where do you draw the line?
A "crack-inspired" judge might argue that the fact that regulation is
done in software is a problem regardless of the drivers license /
nature.