Submitted by “Qualcomm Incorporated and Atheros Communications, Inc., today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement whereby Qualcomm intends to acquire Atheros, a leader in innovative technologies for wireless and wired local area connectivity in the computing, networking and consumer electronics industries.”
I hope this doesn’t mean the end of open source Atheros driver development.
So the worst wireless vendor is going to buy out the greatest?
Wonder how long before the open-source drivers for all that great Atheros gear gets closed up and buried?
In what way are Qualcomm considered the ‘worst wireless vendor’?
I thought the Atheros devices needed to be reverse-engineered in order to make a free/open driver. That’s what I remember on OpenBSD at least. Atheros didn’t make it easy to write that driver by providing adequate programmer documentation.
Check out http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html and look at the 3.7 and 3.9 releases. Or just search that page for “Atheros”.
Atheros was one of the first to produce a working, full-featured, stable driver for non-Windows OSes. FreeBSD used it from the get-go. Sure, it had a binary HAL, but it was free for anyone to use, and it did 108 Mbps SuperG speeds with full WPA support.
It was also the basis for one of the best wireless networking stacks around (FreeBSD) for many years. How many wireless networking stacks did Linux go through? Something like 4 or 5, with each wireless driver including it’s own.
OBSD didn’t like the binary HAL and reverse-engineered the chip developing the ath5k? ath9k? athsomethingk driver. Not as full-featured as the ath driver, but it didn’t use a binary HAL. Eventually, that got picked up everyone as the Atheros wireless driver.
Compared to Broadcom, Intel, Cisco, Aironet, TrendNet, TP-Link, Linksys, etc, Atheros was the shit. You wanted good wireless hardware? You looked for Atheros chipsets inside. I still use our PC-Card-based D-Link and NetGear wireless NICs (108 Mbps SuperG Atheros chipsets) since they’re a heck of a lot faster/smoother/nicer/better than any 802.11G stuff out there, and are just a tiny bit slower than 802.11n-150 gear. Even in laptops that have wireless built-in.
Indeed, OpenBSD has a current driver for the latest Atheros 9k devices.. athn(4).
It’s a very full featured driver, works wonderfully, but indeed a work of reverse engineering.
How is copying and refactoring code from ath9k a work of reverse engineering?
I love it how people say, “A leader …”. There can only be one leader.
In their own press releases every U.S company is the world leader.