In what represents the final victory in the long struggle between the free-software community and Broadcom, the developers of the open-source b43 wireless driver announced a few days ago that they’ve succeeded in reverse-engineering firmware for Broadcom-based cards.

Because Broadcom had long refused to release specifications or a Linux driver for its devices, the b43 hackers began working a few years ago to reverse-engineer their own driver.  They were successful, with nearly every Broadcom chip now working well.  However, the driver relies on firmware that until recently could only be extracted from “binary blobs” owned by Broadcom.

Although Ubuntu and other distributions made this extraction process easy via the Hardware Drivers utility, it was still difficult for some users to obtain the necessary files.  More importantly, Ubuntu’s redistribution of the firmware represented a legal gray area, since technically Broadcom retained ownership of the extracted files.

Open-source firmware means that these legal uncertainties can be easily avoided, and that Ubuntu can now ship with Broadcom firmware out-of-the-box, sparing users the difficulty of downloading it themselves.

Of course, there are some caveats: for now, the firmware lacks important features, including support for wireless encryption, and it seems to work only with certain cards.  But these deficiencies will surely be corrected, maybe even in time for the release of Jaunty in April.

Broadcom’s next move

The interesting twist in this story is that Broadcom began easing its hostility to the Linux community when it released a closed-source driver supporting some wireless cards last summer.  As I wrote in October, that move seemed to stem from dealings between Broadcom and Canonical, which was worried about the legal issues involved in the use of the open-source driver.

Now that the Linux community has free firmware and free drivers, Broadcom can no longer scare distributions with the threat of legal ambiguity, and has thus lost its relevance.  In this situation, Broadcom has two choices: 1) resort to the old tactics of hating on free software and refusing to work with the community, which will earn it nothing but resentment; or 2) like Intel and Atheros, learn to love Linux by helping the b43 developers make their driver even better, which will encourage Linux users to buy more Broadcom hardware.  Let’s hope it chooses the latter path.

N.B.: the free firmware is available here, although compiling and installing it is not for the faint-of-heart.

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