https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ http://gpl-violations.org/helping/
I'm hoping there's another donation matching campaign at LCA2017 for Conservancy next year - I was able to donate somewhere close to $300 via that last year.
Not really take Broadcom fro example, from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/broadcom_wireless#Histo...
Broadcom has a noted history with its support for Wi-Fi devices regarding GNU/Linux. For a good portion of its initial history, Broadcom devices were either entirely unsupported or required the user to tinker with the firmware. The limited set of wireless devices that were supported were done so by a reverse-engineered driver. The reverse-engineered b43 driver was introduced in the 2.6.24 kernel.
In August 2008, Broadcom released the 802.11 Linux STA driver officially supporting Broadcom wireless devices on GNU/Linux. This is a restrictively licensed driver and it does not work with hidden ESSIDs, but Broadcom promised to work towards a more open approach in the future.
In September 2010, Broadcom released a fully open source driver. The brcm80211 driver was introduced in the 2.6.37 kernel and in the 2.6.39 kernel it was sub-divided into the brcmsmac and brcmfmac drivers.
I hate that this is true. Could anyone explain to me why though? Would it not make life easier for them if they just open sourced their firmware and let other people update/maintain it? (Sorry for the noob question, I haven't looked into this in detail)
2) FCC prefers SDN radios be blackboxes
3) costs more money to document and support
2) Seems like a small subset of devices. And the FCC only has power in the US right?
3) Surely they have to document their stuff internally anyway. And being opensource can mean free documentation. Same for support.
In that case, never. Trying to get vendors to open source anything is a hilarious exercise in futility.