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

[Suresh Govindachar]

 Bruno Wolff III wrote: 
 >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).  
 
 Not so;  I have read their licence.txt -- have you?  The
 licence.txt is in simple English (not leaglease) -- it allows
 distribution of the firmware.

 > Hence it can't be in Fedora.

 My original question was why use the indirect approach of
 fwcutter rather than the direct approach of using the stuff
 provided by Broadcom.  The question was _not_ about why
 Broadcom's firmware is not distributed in Fedora.

 I think the reason why Broadcom's firmware is not in Fedora is
 because Broadcom does not provide (VHDL, Verilog or whatever)
 source code for the firmware, and Fedora.org wants source code
 for everything in it distributes.
   
 > 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.