As one of the MadWifi developers, I'd like to respond on the part of the article that refers to "my" project:
Quote:
|
Mysteriously, it has virtually no support from the Madwifi Project, which is the development team responsible for creating Atheros drivers for Linux-based operating systems.
|
Wrong. We have madwifi-old-openhal as well as dadwifi-openhal branches in our repository, and the person who actively ports OpenHAL to Linux - Nick Kossifidis - works directly in that repository.
Of course, there is still a lot of work to do, but Rome wasn't built in one day. Since the HAL is an integral part of the driver switching to another HAL variant is a complicated task and can not be expected to happen instantly.
Quote:
|
Madwifi continues to primarily support the proprietary Atheros HAL,
|
What else should we do in your oppinion? Cut the support for the binary-only HAL and leave the users in the rain while the integration of OpenHAL into MadWifi is worked on? This is not the way we want to deal with the users of our driver.
To explain: we're currently evaluating various options to come to a state where - in the far away future - MadWifi would be accepted for inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel. One of the necessary milestones will be to provide a OSS-compatible solution to the current binary-only HAL, and one of the evaluated options is inclusion of OpenHAL. This work is carried out in the above mentioned branches of the repository.
Until that work is completed and a final decision on which way to go has been made, it obviously makes no sense to drop the current (and working) driver variant that relies on the critizised binary-only HAL.
Quote:
|
though there is an old and uninformative page in the Madwifi Wiki about it.
|
Old? Looking at the history, the page has been created "10/18/06", telling the interested reader that it's just a little more than two months old.
Uninformative? Well, we aren't perfect and we can't fight on all fronts at the same time (please don't forget that none of us is paid for the work on the driver).
After all: it's a wiki. Users are welcome to contribute text that makes the page better understandable. Questions on that topic will be answered as our time and knowledge allows when they are sent to one of the known mailing lists.
Quote:
|
The email addresses listed for the Madwifi developers either bounce
|
Which of the given addresses bounced, and where and why? At least the one from me does definitely not bounce (unless the IP of the sending mail server is listed either in list.dsbl.org, safe.dnsbl.sorbs.net or sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org). Even then there's always the mailing lists as a possibility to get in contact with the team, if other ways fail - an option that was not used, as far as I can see.
Quote:
|
or elicit no response to requests
|
I can not speak for the others on the team, but I'm quite sure I didn't get a request from the person who wrote the article on my published mail addresses. Obviously, I can not respond to something I didn't get.
Quote:
|
for comments on why there is no apparent effort to use the open source HAL in Madwifi.
|
This part of the sentence shows that the article has, at least partially, been badly researched. There were some extensive discussions in madwifi-devel as well as netdev about integrating OpenHAL into MadWifi during the last weeks, and at least madwifi-old-openhal has been updated several times during the last days.
Quote:
|
It may very well be pressure from Atheros that keeps ar5k out of Madwifi,
|
Bullshit. Atheros didn't put any pressure on us, neither in terms of development decisions nor in other terms.
Quote:
|
but no one at Madwifi or Atheros would talk to me about it.
|
Again: it's hard to respond if one is not asked.
