staging/wlan-ng firmware blob

[Karl Relton]

On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 11:13 -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 5:56 AM, Karl
> Relton<karllinuxtest.relton at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 16:15 -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Karl
> >> Relton<karllinuxtest.relton at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> >> > Dear friends
> >> >
> >> > With the advent of 2.6.31 into Karmic, please be advised that the
> >> > staging/wlan-ng driver (module prism2_usb.ko) used for prism2_usb cards
> >> > can now load the card firmware blob direct from /lib/firmware using the
> >> > normal kernel firmware mechanism (previously it required a special
> >> > userspace program to squirt the firmware at it).
> >> >
> >> > The driver will load prism2_ru.hex if present in /lib/firmware.
> >> >
> >> > Therefore can we upgrade the Ubuntu linux-firmware package to include
> >> > this file?
> >>
> >> Patches to the linux-firmware should be sent to David Woodhouse. Since
> >> this is upstream drivers/staging it should be welcomed.
> >>
> >
> > Yes indeed. I have emailed David a couple of times over the past few
> > weeks, but haven't had any response at all. I wondered if there was a
> > policy against firmware for old wireless cards.
> 
> Try again, this time cc linux-wireless.
> 
> >> The next question is the license of the firmware. Who is giving you
> >> rights to redistribute it and so on? Its preferred that the authors of
> >> the firmware from the company involved send the patch themselves but
> >> not required.
> >>
> >
> > I had already made some enquires to the maintainers of the linux-wlan-ng
> > project who include the firmware in their tarball (which forms the
> > source of the Ubuntu linux-wlan-ng* packages). They checked their
> > paper-trail as much as they could - the trail is complicated because the
> > originating company has changed hands so many times. As far as they
> > could tell the last owners were Conexant who freely distributed this
> > firmware. I put words to this effect in the WHENCE file to David
> > Woodhouse, with a signed-off-by from the guy at linux-wlan-ng project.
> 
> OK good, the more detailed the better in the WHENCE file. Also it is
> good for this information to be explained in the commit log entry for
> the patch you send.
> 
> Why doesn't a member of the linux-wlan-ng project send this patch himself?
> 

Thanks for the good advice Luis. I've resent as you have suggested.
The original linux-wlan-ng project maintainers are not working on the
mainline staging driver, which is why they are not actively pushing the
firmware upstream. They are in support of my efforts, however.

Cheers
Karl