Going from Broadcom's sources to wireless card to WPA network

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 09:06:25 -0800,
  Suresh Govindachar <sgovindachar at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  
>   Bruno Wolff III wrote: 
>   >On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 15:10:24 +0000,
>   >  Suresh Govindachar <sgovindachar at yahoo.com> wrote:
>   >> 
>   >> But why such an indirect approach when Broadcom supports Linux
>   >> on: http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php (such
>   >> support has existed since October 2008.)
>   >
>   >Because they don't let people redistribute their firmware.
> 
>   They do;  that's why they have the linux_sta.php page linked above.

That's not what I said. That page is Broadcom distributing the firmware.
They don't let other people do it (at least not without signing a contract).
Hence it can't be in Fedora.

They don't typically seem to enforce that, as router distros have been doing
that for a long time. But that doesn't mean that it is right or wise to
do so.

Fedora will include firmware that is freely redistributable (even if it
is restricted to being unmodified) in order to have functional hardware
support.