Re: We have ath, now what about Broadcom?

From: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_one-eyed-alien.net>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:32:57 -0700
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 06:21:23PM -0400, Matthew Emmerton wrote:
> Why would Broadcom be scared?  Obviously it's the _driver_ that controls the
> power/freq output of the chip, so the responsibility of staying within FCC
> regs is that of the driver authors.  Of course, the "no warranty" aspects of
> open source drivers turns a blind eye to liability, but would things really
> come back to Broadcom?

It's not sufficent for a manufacture of RF equipment to say "don't do
that".  They have to take real, more or less working steps to keep you
from doing things you aren't supposed to do.  This is why the Linksys
link boosters were pulled.  FWIW, there is a solution to this which Sam
used to when implementing ath(4).  That is to implement a binary-only
hardware access layer, ath_hal(4), that keeps you from doing things you
aren't supposed to with the highly programable chips.

-- Brooks

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Received on Wed Jul 23 2003 - 13:33:52 UTC

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