Re: Q: support for AVM Fritz! WLAN USB in kernel 2.6.25+

[Tilman Schmidt <tilman@imap.cc>]

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On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:50:55 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 11:34:26PM +0200, Tilman Schmidt wrote:

>> Please let's keep the politics out of this. I know who wrote that
>> patch, I know the agenda behind it and the discussion accompanying it.
>> Conversely, I'm sure you know fully well that I have no way of putting
>> that question to any relevant person at AVM, and even if I had, it would
>> achieve exactly nothing at all. I am not interested in such fruitless
>> political discussions. I have a simple question, to which I would like
>> a simple answer.
> 
> There's no "politics" here at all.

Oh, please ... You aren't seriously trying to tell me there's a *technical*
reason for changing EXPORT_SYMBOL to EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL, are you?

Again, I am not interested in discussing that decision. It's been taken,
and I accept it. But let's call a spade a spade.

> And why wouldn't you go ask AVM, they are the ones producing the driver
> for this hardware, how could it be our responsibility to get their code
> to work properly, when we have absolutely no way to do so?

That's not true. Reverting commit 782e70c6fc2290a0395850e8e02583b8b62264d8
would be enough. But again, I am not asking for that. My question isn't
about getting AVM's closed source driver to work with kernel 2.6.25+.
I just want to know whether there is an open source alternative, nothing
more.

> This is between you and AVM.  I really suggest contacting the company.
> I have talked to them in the past and they seem willing to help out
> where they can.

Obviously even you weren't able to convince them to convert their driver
for this device to something compatible with post 2.6.24 kernels. How
then could I possibly hope to achieve anything? I have no contractual
relationship with AVM. I don't know anybody in that company. I don't work
for anyone they would recognize. All I can do is contact the regular
consumer support people who don't even know what I am talking about and
keep asking me to boot Windows, where the device obviously works, so all
is well, no? After all, it does say "System requirements: Windows" on the
box.

But all this is just the fruitless discussion I wanted to avoid. With
your kind permission I'll stop this here and concentrate instead on the
subthread which actually deals with my question.

Thanks,
Tilman


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