[Acx100-users] Linux mainline inclusion, legal issues

[Hauke M. <ha...@ha...>]

Hi,

This driver wasn't included into mainline linux kernel because of legal
problems concerting the reverse engineering of the binary TI driver to
develop this driver.

One way was to ask TI to allow this driver being licensed under the GPL
also if it could contain their intellectual property originally not
covered by that license. [1] As TI started to work with the open source
community some years ago and also works on a open source driver for some
more recent wifi cards by them self, did someone recently (in the last
few years) asked the TI guys if they could allow this driver to be
licensed under the terms of the GPL, also if it could contain their
intellectual property?

I am currently not using this driver and I have to search for my cards I
have last seen some years ago, but it really sucks to have an out of
tree driver. If someone changes the API to mac80211 or any other in
kernel API you have to adapt these changes by your self like this one: [2].

Hauke

[0]: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/acx100/index.php?title=History
[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/6/5/39
[2]:
https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/acx-mac80211/patches/001-make-compatible-with-recent-mac80211.patch