Atheros - Credit: atheros.com
The source for the Atheros HAL, which has kept fully-free distros from being able to work properly on a large amount of hardware, has finally been released under a GPL compatible license.
Sam Leffler, maintainer of the binary HAL that is also used in MadWifi releases, has released the source code for his HAL variant under ISC license. It is available through a Subversion repository (web interface), which is also be used actively for development and further improvements.
In his announcement, Sam states:
Coincident with the release of this code I have concluded my agreement with Atheros whereby I had access to information about their devices. This means that in the future all fixes, updates for new chips, etc. will need to be a community effort. Atheros states the Linux platform will be the reference public code base so folks wanting to add support for other platforms will have to scrape the information from there.
Yay, one more step towards freeeing my eeepc!