Re: [Wirelessdriver-support] Re: support and such

[Amanda W. <am...@al...>]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 8:29 AM, Felix Kronlage wrote:
> thanks for correcting the statements and making the situation a bit 
> clear.

Sure, no problem.

>  I missed the original posting, but from the point of licensing of the 
> source code: each souce file in the driver does have a proper 
> licensing header. According to these licensensing statements the 
> driver (that is currently available from wirelessdriver.sf.net) is 
> release under the 4-clause bsd license. I tried contacting the 
> maintainers of this driver a few months ago, to make sure this really 
> is the case (since sadly a "LICENSE" file is missing from the source).

The wirelessdriver is basically a port of Bill Paul's "wi" driver from 
FreeBSD to IOKit.  Bill's drivers are all under a variation of the 
4-clause BSD license (see 
<http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/wi/if_wi.c>), and to my knowledge 
so is wirelessdriver.  It's gone through a series of maintainers--and 
if Rob has gone on to other things, perhaps it's time for someone else 
to volunteer to take it on, just as Rob did from Ben and Louis, the 
guys who did the original Darwin port.

Just to fill in the history some, the IOXperts driver wasn't based on 
the "wi" driver--I used to work at Lucent, where I encounted the 
spaghetti code that constituted the WaveLAN/Orinoco driver at that 
time. After leaving Lucent I had some ideas about how to write such a 
driver "the right way", which eventually turned into the IOXperts 
driver.  I was amused to note that when Bill wrote the first version of 
the wi driver, he also ranted against how Lucent had set things up :-), 
though he and I took somewhat different approaches.

One note here: any further development on drivers for Prism and Orinoco 
based hardware is likely to be a labor of love, since the hardware is 
now obsolete and getting harder to buy. Only a few PRISM-based cards 
are left on the market, and even the latest Orinoco cards (based on 
Agere's Hermes 2.0 chips) don't work with this driver (or IOXperts's, 
for similar reasons).  At IOXperts, we're looking into ways to support 
new features like WPA, in order to breathe a little more life into the 
802.11b cards people already own, but it's not clear to me how much 
vendor support the PRISM family has left after being sold by Harris to 
Intersil, and by Intersil to Globspan/Virata (which was recently bought 
by Conexant)...


Amanda Walker
IOXperts, Inc.