Qualcomm Buys Atheros For $3.1 Billion

Re:Qualcomm Buys Atheros For $3.1 Billion by calloc on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @12:06PM (#2071547)

The real question is, what is this going to do for future Atheros chipsets and open source drivers? Atheros has always been the chipset to use for Wifi on open source operating systems because it was generally well supported, and provided features the competition couldn't.

I really hope that Qualcomm doesn't change anything in that regard.

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Re:Qualcomm Buys Atheros For $3.1 Billion by adestefan on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @01:00PM (#2071726)

Atheros never supported the development of the open source drivers until ath9k/802.11n. The reason they are so robust is because Atheros chipsets are one of, if not the, most common WiFi chipset in use. Atheros was also one of the first to market with 802.11G chips and madwifi was one of the first to support 802.11G on Linux.

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Re:Qualcomm Buys Atheros For $3.1 Billion by calloc on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @03:53PM (#2072436)

But they could also make it immensely harder to do so, look at prism 54, which require binary blobs to work right, and even then have random failures, or the ralink stuff. It is nowhere near as good as the Atheros stuff.

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