Re: Agere Hermes source-code: copyright situation

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 13:00 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 06:37:18AM +0400, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
> > TJ you can answer me using arvidjaar (at) newmail dot ru. Hopefully
> > one of them works. Re WPA2 - there is no information how to setup
> > CCMP/AES (even if firmware supports it); so no WPA2.
> > 
> > On Thursday 02 October 2008, Dave wrote:
> > > Greg KH wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 05:40:29PM +0100, TJ wrote:
> > > >> On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 14:13 +0400, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
> > > >>>On Wednesday 01 October 2008, Greg KH wrote:
> > > >>>> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 09:49:34AM +0400, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
> > > >>>>> I have here driver that can be built for two different types of
> > > >>>>> hardware from basically the same sources (this is port of old Agere
> > > >>>>> drivers for Hermes-I/Hermes-II chipsets).
> > > >>>> 
> > > >>>> Cool, do you have a link to the code, I'd be glad to add it to
> > > >>>> drivers/staging/ if it's not in a fully-mergable state yet to get wider
> > > >>>> users for it.
> > > >>>
> > > >>> You can look at it here: http://arvidjaar.newmail.ru/wlags49.tar.bz
> > > >>>
> > > >>> I doubt that it is suitable for inclusion at current state if ever.
> > > >>> This is taken directly from Agere 2.4 sources; the only parts that were
> > > >>> touched are kernel glue and wireless extensions interface.
> > > >>>
> > > >>> And it is not GPL'ed, of course. I attach E-Mail I received a while
> > > >>> back with answere from Agere legal department.
> > > >>
> > > >> I'm attaching the original email I sent to Agere and their response for
> > > >> the record, hoping it helps clarify the legal position.
> > > > 
> > > > Very nice, thanks for forwarding this on.
> > > > 
> > > > As the license is BSD, that means we can place it in the kernel tree.
> > > > Do you all mind if I add it to the drivers/staging/ directory so you can
> > > > work on cleaning it up within the main kernel tree infrastructure?
> > >
> > 
> > I do not mind but it is likely makes no sense for H-I now; and
> > I do not own H-II myself so cannot work on it. If we are focusing on
> > H-2/2.5, it would make more sense to make similar modifications to
> > 7.22 driver set from Agere to avoid overlap with Orinoco.
> 
> Ok, let me know what you think is the best thing to do, and I'll be glad
> to help you out with it.

I tend to think that only for USB hardware do we need a new driver, and
that driver can share some things with both hostap and orinoco.  If at
all possible, lets integrate missing hardware support into _existing_
drivers instead of importing drivers of questionable quality.  I've seen
wlags49 before and it's not great.  Right now we don't have any viable
Orinoco USB driver, and while linux-wlan-ng was proposed, there's no way
we're taking a third 802.11 "stack" or the bits in those drivers that
overlap with existing drivers' hardware support.

Dan


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