Re: [NTLK] Hacked WiFi driver

On Jan 7, 2007, at 3:28 PM, Douglas Starnes wrote:
> 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

This is an interesting idea, but like Paul Guyot's More WiFi Cards
[1], Hiroshi's drivers [2] _can_ be improved upon without disabling
the need to register it.

The real question is, is Hiroshi's driver _really_ abandonware at
this point?

Hiroshi is, as you say, "is unreachable for reasons unknown."
However, _registration_ of his driver was closed just over a year
ago. The reason I emphasize the word 'registration' is that Hiroshi
has long had a policy that he has exclusive distribution rights for
the driver and as soon as it's been determined that others have
posted the drivers to other web/download sites then "opening to the
public of the file is stopped." However, the software is still
available for download from his site, so he is still allowing usage
of the basic feature set for free.

Of course, it's been over four years since his last update to the
driver, so maybe he's tired of supporting and/or no longer uses a
Newton (his latest personal site [3] -- currently offline, but still
cached [4] -- has no mention of the Newton). His newer site was
updated as recently as July, so he's got to be around and active in
some way, but we may not be using valid e-mails to contact him or he
may be ignoring us. Unfortunately, this doesn't make his drivers
abandonware yet.

Hiroshi may be unreachable at this time, but he still licenses the
software to us, he's just not licensing the full feature set. Very
disappointing and annoying, but his right as the developer.

I can only hope that we can get ahold of him sometime in the near
future to get him to release the source code or an unlocked version
of the driver to the community. In the meantime, I don't think it's
fair to him to release the hack to the public. However, _do_ hold
onto the hack for a future date when his drivers do become
abandonware (e.g. his site distributing them goes offline and he's
still unreachable.)

[1] http://www.kallisys.com/newton/morewifi/
[2] http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~ngc/eng/newtwave.htm
[3] http://driver-labo.dyndns.org/
[4] http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:-0JMkewGDLMJ:driver-
labo.dyndns.org/+http://driver-labo.dyndns.org/ (http://tinyurl.com/
y29br2)

Morgan Aldridge

--
morgant@makkintosshu.com
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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