Re: [NTLK] Hacked WiFi driver

Okay.

Lets turn the discussion this way:
* We can all agree that Hiroshi *owns* his drivers.
* We can all agree that Hiroshi is unreachable for reasons unknown.
* We can all agree that should Hiroshi ever decide to *return*, he is
legally in the right to pursue action against anyone who violated his
intellectual property per international laws, should he so choose.

So let's look at what we have. Someone has hacked his driver and the
question is now should it be shared.

It seems too sticky to just share a hack of Hiroshi's licensed product - but
what if the hacker in question improved upon Hiroshi? The biggest limit of
Hiroshi's driver is that I cannot use it with my Airport Extreme (WEP
aside). What if the end result of this hack was an updated, improved
driver? Sure, the base work would be based heavily upon Hiroshi's work, but
Hiroshi never supported the newer wireless transmitters. Could someone not
take the hacked code and use it to write updates for the code in question?

I am not saying we should condone a *work-around* for licensing on Hiroshi's
driver, but we should condone someone writing an update to Hiroshi's driver.
The whole issue here is WEP. That is what his license unlocked. The driver
itself was free for download and still is. If there were a
freeware/shareware solution to support more WaveLAN cards or to support
something like an Airport Extreme and it did not touch or unlock the WEP
features, what is the problem?

--Douglas Starnes

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