Template:"Because It Has To Be Free"
From What The Wiki?!
Wireless Support In OpenBSD
The OpenBSD project produces a free, multi-platform 4.4BSD-basedUNIX-like operating system. Their efforts emphasize portability,standardization, correctness, proactive security and integratedcryptography.The developers of OpenBSD are very careful about licensing issues andthe consequent use of free software in their base system. Recently, thishas most notably resulted in missing support for many Wireless LANchipsets due to the non-openess of manufacturers - either they requirethe usage of their very restrictive licensed firmware or the usage ofprecompiled, binary only kernel objects which control hardware access tothe chipsets.This speech addresses these problems and how various manufacturers couldbe convinced to release their firmwares under less restrictive licenses,how the Open Source HAL module for the ath(4) driver was developed aswell as details about the enhanced WLAN support with new drivers andfeatures for the upcoming OpenBSD release 3.7. The Open Source communityhas support for nearly all Ethernet, SCSI and RAID chipsets and whyshouldn't there be Open Source support for all of the Wireless LANchipsets? Or is "Wireless 802.11 a Microsoft only technology?"
