RTL8187 USB wireless dongle

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <46855928.8040508 at gmail.com>
            Jani Piitulainen <jani.piitulainen at gmail.com> writes:
: I'd want to attempt partly writing or porting Linux driver to FreeBSD.  

Cool!

: Which readymade usb-wifi driver would be a good "template" to start 
: from?

if_rum I think is the most modern, but if_ural isn't bad either.  I've
not looked at the others.

: Any GPL-license issues if I choose to port the Linux driver?

As for GPL code, if you create a derivative work, you must license it
under GPL.  If the driver is GPL'd, then it won't be in the default
kernel.

If you use it as a hardware manual for the device and write your own
driver from scratch, then you are free to license it however you
want.  Do not cut and paste code between the two, which is a definite
legal no no.  It would be better if you made sure that things weren't
too similar either.  Obviously, tables of register values to write to
the card are hard to do differently, and copyright law recognizes this
and tends not to offer copyright protection to those sorts of
things[*].

: RTL8187 appears to be a common 802.11g chipset now, in a local store 
: most dongles were based on that chipset (like Netgear wg111v2, D-link 
: and several OEMs for ex. Digitus) and it's also been integrated on many 
: motherboards.
: 
: Linux driver for RTL8187 can be found at 
: "http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtl8180-sa2400".

They were selling here for $20 a little while ago.

Warner

[*] I'm not a lawyer, but merely relating a layman's understanding to
another layman.  If you need legal advise, consult with a competent
lawyer.  Copyright law can get quite murky at times around the edges
and you are best off not trying to guess which side of the line any
specific action would be w/o consulting a lawyer.