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

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 09:53:23 -0800,
  Suresh Govindachar <sgovindachar at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  
>  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.

I hadn't read one since they started providing an open source driver.
This one seems roughly OK. I don't know if there is a sticking point somewhere
or if no one has re-evaluated the situation recently.

>  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 wouldn't consider extracting the firmware from an archive all that direct
either. But again, probably the instructions haven't been re-evaluated since
Broadcom released the open sourced driver.

>  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.

No. Freely redistributable without modification is OK. This is mentioned on
the firmware SIG's page (and some other places):
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/FirmWare#Packaging_guidelines

They may be a good group to poke about the possibility of changing things.

One other thing that might be a sticking point is that this may not be the
same firmware expected by the b43 driver.