Macbook donation (wireless needs fixing)

[NGie Cooper]

> On Feb 8, 2016, at 00:00, Alfred Perlstein <bright at mu.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 2/7/16 11:14 PM, NGie Cooper wrote:
>>> On Feb 7, 2016, at 21:39, Alfred Perlstein <alfred at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 2/7/16 4:24 PM, Brandon Vincent wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Alfred Perlstein <alfred at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>>> Oh, strange, let me see why my macbook4,1 doesn't work with this... maybe
>>>>> it's just not loaded by default?
>>>> You'll need the firmware contained in ports/net/bwi-firmware-kmod.
>>> This can't be part of the base distribution?
>> Not sure of the details, but it looks like no:
>> 
>> NO_PACKAGE=     this is a modified version of a restricted firmware
>> 
>> :(…
> Yes, but last time it was someone being overly zealous about some other firmware that turned out to be fine.
> 
> Why is this firmware restricted?  How are others distributing it? Seems silly.

OpenWRT seems to encourage dumping of wireless firmware [1], and then modifies before they distribute them (I’m guessing based on the NO_PACKAGE message above)? I could be wrong, but this seems to open a number of doors (legally) that would be a bad idea to open without a huge disclaimer because of export laws, copyright laws, etc..

It would be a better idea to couple this with FreeBSD if OpenWRT reverse engineered the firmware (legally) and released the source code for their derivative. Based on what I’m reading (as always, my favorite acronym — IANAL), this seems like a really nasty legal mess for the project to get in to.

Thanks!
-Ngie