Ubuntu is not free.

[Matthew Kuiken]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 19:54 +0200, Ouattara Aziz wrote:
>   
>> They may be afraid other 
>> manufacturers copy their products 
>>     
>
> There is little to copy from exposing which values have to be written to
> some hardware registers to affect a particular action. This _might_ hold
> true in some very specific circumstances, otherwise it's irrational
> behavior.
>   

This whole thread was started because of the Intel IPW2100 and 2200 
firmware, which *very* definitely falls under the description above, and 
given the description, the driver outside of that firmware seems to be 
GPL'd already...

The firmware that runs in a card's microcontroller tells amazing amounts 
of information about how the firmware and hardware are partitioned, 
which algorithms are hard-coded versus done in updates, what 
microcontroller is being used, etc.

As an embedded system designer myself (both hardware and firmware), the 
thought of releasing this kind of code to the public is just mind 
boggling.  I have in the past refused to deliver this code to other 
devisions _of my own company_ in order to maintain a proper development 
path that did not involve unsupportable patches.  I even end up moving 
the line between hardware and software around during the development 
cycle.  Sometimes I will move a software function to hardware if the 
processing warrants it.  More often, I will move a feature from hardware 
to software, because the chip doesn't work quite right.

All of that said, my systems always include an external API, usually 
controllable through a serial port, which is used to control the 
device.  This API is freely available to anyone who is buying our 
product, internal or external to the company.

One last point, even if Intel provided said firmware code, since it is 
for a (most likely proprietary) microcontroller, are you even certain 
that you could compile it...  As I think about it, the firmware could 
even be the programming instructions for an FPGA.  If so, I don't know 
of any free software out there to compile VHDL/Verilog for anything 
bigger than a million gates.  I invite you to try to keep up with the 
design changes from Xilinx/Altera if you'd like to try.

-Matt