On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 14:11 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote: > There are corporate lawyers who are very much afraid that the FCC > could, if they were alerted to the fact that someone had figured out > how to reverse engineer the HAL and/or the firmware to cause their > WiFi unit to become a "super radio" that could transmit on any > frequency, that the FCC could prohibit the *hardware* from being sold > anywhere in the US.
I've heard this claim before. Can you substantiate it in some way? It seems to me that, if this is really true, then the hardware manufacturers have been lying to the FCC for years, claiming that the user cannot reprogram the card, without explaining that, in fact, it's just that users may not know how to, but that they can do so without any hardware mucking. Regardless, the DFSG doesn't say anything about "unless the FCC has an annoying rule". We don't distribute non-free software in Debian. And that's not some sort of choice we might make--it's a a choice we have already made. Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
