SuSE could have, but openSUSE cannot. That is a decision that was made by Novell - only open-licensed software will be distributed.
Well, I do not know what the terms of the agreement with Broadcom are. Novell already provides on nvidia ftp pre-packaged nVidia drivers. I think the same could be done for Broadcom drivers. When I asked, nobody said Broadcom refused and nobody confirmed they asked, so I do not know why this wasn't done.
I have no idea what developer and issue that you refer to. The consequence that I was thinking about is the tainting of the kernel, which in turn will eliminate the chance of any serious kernel developer from looking at any kernel oops that pops up.
Someone wanted to provide updated pre-packaged drivers (graphical drivers), and a "friendly & famous" kernel developer working at Novell replied with a threat of suing the packager. You can find the discussion somewhere in the ML.
The open-source driver for BCM43xx devices will always be trying to catch up.
Exactly. And that's unfixable without involving the manufacturer, with doubt results, since who opened the driver is not exactly keeping them in good shape (Intel as a first example, both for video and wireless cards).
Broadcom has made their decision. Involving them is not an option.
Well, yes. But they are also providing a working driver for quite some card. Ignoring this fact doesn't really help either imho.
I need to look at the installation scripts to see what I can do. At least I know which devices b43 supports.
Sounds good. A trick might be to download the sources and build the driver locally on the user machine to avoid complaints about redistribution of binary code and make also our friends kernel developers happier (they'll say the library is binary anyway, but well, that's Broadcom problem in the end). Best, A. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-testing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-testing+help@opensuse.org