On Die, 2007-11-27 at 09:45 -0800, John Clark wrote:
[...]
> In the case of the Wireless devices however, there is the added item of 
> FCC (or other country regulatory
> agencies), and the FCC's requirement of disallowing 'fiddling' with the 
> radios and circumventing any
> limits on power/spectrum usage of the device. Of course since the power 

First we have such a club in .at too. Second that argument is quite
flawed if not wrong and IMHO just an excuse used by the close-sourced
("old economy") managements.
Why?
These regulations (at least the ones in .at) apply to the usage in the
field for these devices. That implies that they apply (in the context of
free mesh networks) to the people running the antennas and systems
(independent if they do it commercially or privately).

So the producer of such a device or some shop later on cannot be held
liable for misuse afterwards (at least not in central Europe. Maybe that
is somewhat different in the USA given that peop^Wlawyers there like to
sue there if there is much money to make).

One simple argument is: You cannot realistically guarantee by the
hardware that it cannot be misused. Take an OpenWRT54, take short and
good cables to a high-quality antenna (forget the original ones),
configure the smallest possible output and you are beyond the 100mW EIRP
which are hereover allowed. So how can the hardware producer guarantee,
that now one misuses it?
He cannot influence the cabling and antennas.

BTW no one is holding a gun or car producer liable for misuse of guns or
cars. Not even in the USA AFAIK.

> can be limited in hardware,
> it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that for the most part, 
> the chip manufacturers are
> probably hiding behind that sort of regulation to avoid further 
> discussion on opening up the 'box'...

Full ACK.


> Oh, and as a final note... Broadcom has been particularlly unhelpful in 
> the past to the open source community.

Yes, I have a laptop with an Broadcom chipset.

	Bernd
-- 
Firmix Software GmbH                   http://www.firmix.at/
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