Re: [Madwifi-devel] reversed HAL

[Jean L. <lo...@cl...>]

> I suppose it does help to reverse engineer.

I suppose it can only bring trouble, read on :)

> 
> The fact Atheros does not make the programming documentation available
> (that's not legally bound by the FCC rules) indicates that its motives

Could you elaborate on this FCC "legalities" ?

> are purely financial. It clearly does not want to lose control of
> product support. Meaning, after they think its commercial lifetime is
> over they rather want you to buy a new product than to keep using the old
> one.
> This is of course perfectly understandable for a commercial company. ;) 

I don't understand why people keep complaining about HAL. It is 1% of 
the source yet generates almost 100% of trouble. As Alfred stated, the 
day Atheros become bored with all this "gimme the HAL source" whining, 
they will drop MADWifi. You'll find yourself quickly lagging behind for 
newer atheros products linux support and you'll have to choose between : 
"yeah, it does really help to reverse engineer, now I have to reverse 
engineer this NDIS driver to figure out how to adapt the HAL to the new 
chipset". And when you think you figured it out, you release your driver 
and keep getting users' complaints because your hacked driver does not work.

Hopefully, when these dark days arise, you will not be alone, there will 
be THAT purely-financial-motives-driven company that sells an NDIS 
wrapper so you can use your favorite windows driver !

As for the commercial point regarding Atheros, I don't think the HAL 
stuff was profit driven when MADwifi was launched.

> So if you own a perfectly well working Atheros WLAN device, without it
> being documented in some way, in source code or otherwise. You may risk
> it will stop working if you upgrade to version 2.7.11.42 of your
> favorite OS. Even the current maintainer (or Atheros for that matter)
> doesn't have eternal life, or may lose interest in supporting it some
> day.

Opensource projects tend to survive even when maintainers change. Just 
imagine the HAL as the holy grail :-). And to paraphrase Sam (Hi Sam, I 
think you will save one post on this one) : <<There is nothing you want 
to do in the HAL>>. It's some pure wrapping mechanics that only help 
newer parts to work with older madwifi codebase.

> I think the OpenBSD approach in very sensible!

I think it is harmful to madwifi.
> 
> Its merely documenting a device you already own, I don't see any legal issue in makeing your investment last longer....

For a really exhaustive native machine language documentation, you might 
want to try this ;-)

hexdump -C ath_hal.ko | a2ps -o atheros_hal_doc.ps

Cheers,

Jean