Atheros Wi-Fi drivers go open source

Good news from the leading Wi-Fi silicon maker - it's opened up, so its hardware will fully supported upstream in Linux.

Atheros will share source code for its hardware abstraction layer (HAL) with the open source projects working to support it in Linux - reports Sam Leffler, the champion of open source Atheros support.

Sam has released the source for his HAL binary, and announced: "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."

This is great news for Linux laptop users. Linux Wi-Fi support has been getting much better of late, but Atheros has been mistrustful in the past. Thanks to Steven Vaughan-Nichols for the link.