WIRELESS 0.3

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Sat Sep 30 21:09:29 UTC 2006



Paul W. Frields schrieb:
> On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 21:36 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> David Zeuthen schrieb:
>>> On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 12:01 -0700, Frank S. wrote:
>>>> Hi thank you for your reply, I do not have a lot of problem with
>>>> wireless cards, but why we have to make it harder to people starting
>>>> to use LINUX, It seams that other Distros do NOT have this problems
>>>> about legal or they are not afraid (Ubuntu, freespire, SLED 10, Mepis,
>>>> and others) the problem is that there are to many Distros and when
>>>> people have problems with one they do not bother to fix the problem
>>>> they just try another Distro, If we want to make Fedora Core Bigger we
>>>> have to start thinking in a diff. way.
>>> It has been adequately explained why Fedora Core / Extras don't carry
>>> non-free software or why Fedora Core isn't shipping out-of-tree drivers. [...]
>> I'm wondering if we should document this explicitly somewhere in an
>> "official" place.
> Isn't http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems enough? [...]

Well, I can't see anything about wlan drivers there -- madwifi, which is
really problematic, would fit there really well.

But it's getting more complicated when it comes to acx and ipw3945,
because even on LKML there are different opinions about their legal
status and if they are acceptable for the kernel.

And to quote David: "[...]why Fedora Core isn't shipping out-of-tree
drivers" -- this is more a political position and not strictly forbidden
afaics. It should probably be documented somewhere, too.

I'm working on something in this area for Extras currently that
describes why the best place for kernel-modules is the upstream kernel.
But that's not ready for public consumption yet; parts of that document
probably could be used for a document that explains why Fedora Core
normally does not ship out-of-tree drivers in the kernel.

CU
thl




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