Re: rt73 driver trouble

[Jouni Malinen <j w1 fi>]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 09:35:50PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 15:52 -0300, Lamarque Vieira Souza wrote:
> > 	I managed to make NetworkManager to work with rt73 driver. The two 
> > patches I used are attached. The wpa_supplicant-0.4.8-ralink.diff 
> > patch is just a patch form of the files supplied by Ralink in 
> > directory RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.6/WPA_Supplicant.
> 
> Custom wpa_supplicant drivers are not the answer.  The answer is to fix
> the driver to work correctly with the WEXT driver.  That's why
> NetworkManager _only_ uses the WEXT driver with wpa_supplicant, because
> there needs to be standardization on _one_ interface so that we don't
> need to re-write stuff 50 times for each driver.

While I agree with the part that drivers should really use WEXT, my
policy on driver specific interface implementations for wpa_supplicant
is quite a bit more open than the one for NM. However..

> > 	Do you think the wpa_supplicant-0.4.8-ralink.diff can be applied to 
> > main wpa_supplicant? There is not indication of which license the 
> > code in RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.6/WPA_Supplicant uses, the code in 
> > RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.6/Module is GPL.

This is an issue. I will not apply any random patch from a vendor that
someone else sends to me, especially so, if there is no clear license
statement or the change is licensed only under GPL. In other words, if
someone really wants to get this patch into wpa_supplicant, that someone
will need to talk with the copyright holder and confirm that this patch
is available under a compatible (both GPLv2 and BSD) license. In many
cases, it may be easier to just get the driver converted to support
WE-18 for WPA configuration..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA