hell freezes over!

[JD]

On 09/10/2010 01:25 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
>>> I wonder what changed to cause Broadcom to change tune.  Broadcom seemed
>>> to think that their secret sauce was oh so important to keep secret.
>>>
>>> -wolfgang
>> I think the reason was that the driver would expose information
>> about the inner design of their chipset, which they felt might
>> compromise the secrecy of product design advantages (or perhaps
>> disadvantages).
> Broadcom have been helpful in other areas.
>
> Wireless has been particularly problematic for many vendors for a long
> time because the US regulations require wireless devices are not user
> tamperable. This leads to questions like "what does that mean if it's open
> source and you can set an unapproved frequency or power by hacking the
> code"
>
> The penalties for getting that wrong are rather high. Some vendors have
> done things like alternate firmware which does the sanity checks on card.
> I've no idea what actually drove the Broadcom decision and how they've
> actually addressed it, but for wireless manufacturers the open-sourcing
> decisions have been a good deal more complicated than simple "secret
> sauce" type arguments.
>
> Alan
I think a very big 'MAYBE' should be tacked to your explanation.
We have had open  source wireless drivers long before BCM did any
thing to "ease" the so called complicated safeguards to prevent
rogue use of the wireless devices.
I think secret sauce has been the case for many manufactures.
NVIDIA, for example, will not release their graphics driver.
And how dangerous can that be, as far as safety is concerned?
Has nothing to do with safety or modification of driver source to
do harm. It has much more to do with protecting proprietary functional
design secrets.