[Prism54-devel] Re: [Prism54-users] Open hardware wireless cards

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 08:22:10PM +0000, Steve Hill wrote:
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> On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
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> >What I think we probably will have to do is just work torwards seeing if
> >we can come up with our own open wireless hardware. I know there was
> >a recent thread on lkml about an open video card -- anyone know where
> >that ended up?
> 
> This may be a silly point, but there *was* good 802.11g hardware available 
> which worked well with the fully open drivers. 

Yes, that would be the Full MAC prism chipsets with the linux prism54 driver,
which I help maintain.

> I presume the 
> manufacturers are moving to the "softmac" design instead because (for 
> them) it is cheaper.

That is correct. They have already moved to the Softmac design and
you're lucky if you can buy FullMAC chipsets in stores now.

> However, the point is that the working designs are 
> already there and it may be that buying the existing design which is being 
> phased out is cheaper for the FOSS community than developing a whole new 
> open device.

Definitely, I agree. Anyone have an idea of how much buying a wireless
chipset design may cost?

> Maybe it would be possible to convince one of the manufacturers that it's 
> worth their while producing the older design hardware - if there is a 
> single manufacturer who is making more or less the only hardware that is 
> guaranteed to work under Linux there is probably quite a market for them.

I think they made the move because of economics as you mentioned
earlier. Under the current circumstances, I find it hard to be able to
Convince Conexant, for example, to start selling FullMAC chipsets again.

AFAICT the FullMAC chipsets have reached the END OF LIFE period.

	Luis

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