Qualcomm: Release fully-free drivers for modern Wi-Fi chipsets

To:
Cristiano Amon
CEO of Qualcomm, Inc.

Dear Mr. Amon,

In 2008, your company's predecessor Atheros gave the GNU/Linux community a valuable gift. That year saw the first release of ath9k, a suite of Linux kernel drivers with complete source code for Atheros 802.11 chipsets.

ath9k was the first entirely free (as in freedom) Wi-Fi driver for the Linux kernel. At last, it was possible for GNU/Linux users to connect to wireless networks without having to struggle with proprietary drivers or binary-only firmware.

Rightfully, Atheros won the goodwill and fierce loyalty of GNU/Linux users. Its chipsets gained an enviable reputation for compatibility and quality. For many years, ath9k and ath9k_htc-supported hardware has been the go-to recommendation for GNU/Linux users, new and experienced alike.

Although your company still deserves our gratitude, times have moved on. As new technologies made them obsolete, the chipsets supported by fully-free drivers have been discontinued; used hardware becomes more scarce year after year.

Today, there are no fully-free Linux kernel drivers for contemporary Wi-Fi hardware. As Atheros's successor, Qualcomm is in a unique position to once again win the devotion of GNU/Linux users. We, the undersigned, ask Qualcomm to release fully-free drivers for its in-production Wi-Fi chipsets, just as Atheros did 16 years ago.

(Confused about what this all means? There's an version of this article for that explains in a very basic way what a kernel, drivers and firmware do here)

Chances are your system's Linux kernel uses non-free code to communicate with some of your hardware. Sometimes this is simply because you've installed a proprietary driver. However, many otherwise-free drivers often depend on uploading proprietary firmware to the hardware itself. Usually, this firmware is supplied only as bunch of unreadable numbers: a 'binary blob'. Drivers that use non-free firmware are especially common for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and video cards.

Drivers that aren't free — even in part — make us dependent on the companies that wrote them. Without source code, it's very difficult to investigate malfunctions and almost impossible to fix them. Only the company that owns the driver has the ability to do it for us and they may well decide that it's not in their interest to do so. If a driver is entirely non-free, it can't even be independently updated to work with newer kernel versions or rebuilt for new architectures.

When the inner workings of non-free drivers and firmware are secret, we're forced to take companies at their word that they operate as intended and don't contain malicious features. Useful research is also stymied. Fully-free drivers like ath9k have been the subject of dozens of academic papers investigating how wireless networking can be improved, all because their free license gives people the right to tinker and learn. What if the same could be true for even more hardware?

We should use hardware that works with fully-free drivers. Our independence is worth it.