atheros chips dangerous?

[Doug Barton]

Wesley Morgan wrote:

> I agree, the Atheros driver is fantastic. The driver may be "binary" in
> some ways, but I think we got the best of both worlds. The vendor is
> providing every scrap of information necessary without having to give
> away trade secrets, and FreeBSD got a driver authored by a developer who
> is probably one of the most qualified people in the world to work on it.
> I know I go out of my way to purchase and recommend Atheros-based
> wireless devices because of this.
> 
> Anyone who simply makes the blanket assumption that because something is
> "FOSS" that it gets more peer review need only to look at some of the
> oldest open source projects around, such as sendmail or XFree/Xorg, to
> realize that security problems can persist for years without being
> discovered.

I can't resist the urge to add a "me too" on all points here, especially the
part about going out of my way to use and recommend Atheros bits. These guys
are a model for how hardware vendors can successfully interact with the open
source community for mutual benefit.

Doug

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