KernelTrap: OpenBSD: Intel Accused Of Being “An Open Source Fraud”

“Damien Bergamini started a thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing
list in which he summarized Intel’s policy toward open-source
software being to ‘make us look like we’re open-source friendly by
opening a project on sourceforge,’ and, ‘give the open-source
community the bare minimum so that they can serve as our
beta-testers.’ Damien released a reverse engineered blob-free
driver for an Intel wireless chipset earlier this year, but work is
slow as Intel does not freely provide documentation to the chipset.
OpenBSD’s battle with Intel has been ongoing for some time leading
project creator Theo de Raadt to say, ‘before we ask a vendor, we
have already lost (ie. the device does not work). When a vendor
says no, we have lost nothing further–there is no way we can lose
further than having the device not work. We can only win, and then
the device works. So there is no point in giving up until we win
back the rights to write software for the hardware that we have
purchased.’ As before, the goal is to get Intel to provide a freely
distributable binary firmware…”

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