[shmerl]

For firmware. The driver itself is open. I don't think even Qualcomm have open firmware for 802.11ac chips. That's an unfortunate trend. While drivers are getting more open, firmware blobs are becoming more prevalent, in GPUs, WiFi and etc.

[wtallis]

The really unfortunate thing is that they're putting the wrong things into the proprietary firmware. I'd be fine with signed proprietary firmware that only enforces FCC limits and regulations. That would make it harder if I wanted to sell my used equipment overseas, but wouldn't otherwise restrict my freedoms.

I'm not fine with the bottom half of the network stack being offloaded to the proprietary firmware where we can't adjust or even directly see things like how many packets it's buffering and how it handles aggregation and retransmissions.