Why free wifi?

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Jayn
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Iscritto: 08/27/2010

I would like to know various reasons for choosing only free wifi drivers. Is it conceivable that so much improvement can be made to a wifi driver past a certain point?
in my case, not having free driver means unnecessary expense of a new wifi card and increased power consumption (matters to laptop users) The main disadvantage to non-free wifi drivers I can forsee is allowing spying but unless there are actual cases, I think that thinking is a little paranoid.

Weigh in. Thanks

Jayn
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Iscritto: 08/27/2010

Also, does anyone know how i could start to write a Free driver if I had to?

Magic Banana

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Iscritto: 07/24/2010
SirGrant

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Iscritto: 07/27/2010

Exactly, the freedom to study it is very important. Check out this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html). In proprietary software you never know. They could put an NSA backdoor inside or anything. The only way you can be sure is having free software.

SirGrant

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Iscritto: 07/27/2010

I'm gonna follow-up on my previous post. You say "why free wi-fi" Let me flip your question around and ask "why not free wi-fi?" What is the reason why hardware manufacturers don't release free drivers and firmware?