No wireless, No Trisquel

It won't be reverse engineered. The task is non-trivial. The way to resolve these types of issues is to band together and support free software compatible hardware. With enough people purchasing the same hardware it can be better supported. It also helps to penalise those who aren't don't as good a job.

In many cases there aren't actually any free software compatible solutions. Which makes it all the more important that even where something is fairly easy to get elsewhere purchasing from companies like ours can make the difference later for devices you may want and otherwise not be able to get. There are at least a few wifi cards for instance that until now had no solution or will soon have no solution (if we didn't/don't step in).

Even with all the wifi adapters we sell it isn't anywhere near the number that are needed to put a dent in funding or convincing atheros/or another chipset manufacturer to release free drivers. We are talking with design firms though so that we have a better idea what numbers are needed and what goals are feasible. It will help us determine which projects to focus on.

That said I think it will be possible in the future to have an influence on the market. As long as people continue to make purchasing decisions based on freedom rather than trying to get everything under the sun to work (which never ends well anyway- even on non-free distributions- in particular over time).

In three years we have gone from having a small catalog of free software compatible hardware, to having a decent size, to having a large catalog (competitively speaking). It is by far the largest selection for GNU/Linux anywhere, and the only real catalog of free software compatible hardware. People are making a huge difference even now. It's giving more people the *ability* to use free software that could never have gotten hardware working before. Numbers matter. Both from our ability to get things done and the ability to influence and get our objectives met (the release of or development of free drivers/firmware/software). With more dollars coming in the more hardware we can work on and the better the support will be.

If you make a purchase from http://libre.thinkpenguin.com/ we donate 25% of the profits to the Trisquel project. This is one of the projects which needs funding. We also donate 10% of sales from one of our channels to the free software foundation. We are also giving people the opportunity to donate 10% to the free software foundation from https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/free-software-foundation

The later link is actually linked to from advertising we are doing elsewhere (well, sponsoring of another project- which links to us) and most of those users are new to the concept of free software.

Any Atheros Mini PCI, Mini PCIe, PCI, or Mini PCIe card in theory should work. We have run into some cards that are more problematic though. While we are donating 25% to Trisquel it isn't really just 25% going to a free software cause. There are other projects we are working on. Try finding a low profile atheros card for instance that works well with free software. It really isn't practical to get anything elsewhere. If you are in Australia you could order a bracket for a TP-Link card which works. Other than that you are pretty much out of luck. I forget if the TP-Link card was one of the cards which were problematic. I know in one form (PCI/PCIe) it was a problem on some machines.

Anyway. We have a solid solution to it now available. Well, one of them. We should have a solution for both PCI and PCIe for low-profile systems soon. Currently just one is listed. We have a factory making brackets for the other.

Don't get us wrong. We totally understand wanting your hardware to work. IMO (no stats to back it up) wireless cards not working is the number one question we get here from new members.

Here is some basic math on the matter. In the USA the federal minimum wage is $7.25 hour. At minimum wage that would pay for 13-14 hours of developer time. Firstly that isn't enough time to reverse engineer the drivers/firmware (if it was they would already exist). Secondly, a person with the skills required to do that I'm sure would want to be paid more then minimum wage.

Unfortunately $100 isn't really going to cut it for reverse engineering it. As Chris said it is a non-trivial task. Take gnash for example the GNU replacement for adobe flash player. Adobe flash is on version 11 I think while gnash only supports up to flash 9 support. This is because reverse engineering is hard. Secondly, adobe has in their license that you can't reverse engineer it. That means the devs have to do it and they can't even use the non-free one as an example. Reverse engineering takes very specialised know-how. If it could be done for $100 it would have been done already. The amount needed to do it as my estimate would be in the thousands for sure.

If you are committed to putting money which is fine I would advise you to do it as a crowd-funded task. The idea is that users basically set a bounty on something they want done. So lets say they set the bounty on this to $50,000. You could contribute your $100 dollars to the bounty and so could other users. If the task never gets done then you never have to pay the $100. They only collect if the task is completed.

I'm not sure about the feasibility of reverse engineering an Intel wireless chipset although there was one wireless chipset that was reverse engineered many years ago. The catch is I think it was only the driver. Newer cards would also need firmware reverse engineered and I believe that is an even harder task. The amount of time it took to reverse engineer that old chipset was years. Even with the source code it can take years to get a relatively stable driver through from development to inclusion in distributions.

Even if you have $20,000 US to donate to the cause I'm a bit sceptical that there is going to be a solution. We are working on solving one of these issues and I'm still waiting to hear back from those with the technical expertise and costs.