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NewsFr200611IkanosProvidesEagle4FirmwaresForFree ] - [
NewsEs200611IkanosProvidesEagle4FirmwaresForFree ]
Ikanos Communication, Inc has chosen the license BSD to distribute for free (gratis) the following parts necessary for the driver of eagle4 chipsets USB firmware / datapump (DSPcode):
1 - Eagle IV 8051 USB firmware binary -- converted to a hex table in "e4_firmware.h".
2 - Eagle IV datapump binary for ISDN modems (e4_dsp_code_isdn_0x0d19050b_3.0.15B.bin).
3 - Eagle IV datapump binary for POTS modems (e4_dsp_code_pots_0x0a10050b_3.0.15A.bin).
All the files are in e4_fw_rel_103106.zip with the following checksum:
ec23c429d7290c5097cbfb7a43ad0d2b
Full text of the license applying to this distribution is available in a file in each directory and/or included in the header.
The file is available for download at:
http://eagle-usb.org/ueagle-atm/ikanos/ and
http://download.gna.org/ueagleatm/ikanos/
The following step is to use this USB firmware and DSPcode for the ueagle-atm driver.
That's a very good news for the free software community : this (quite-libre) licensing is again recognized as necessary by a vendor to ensure official easier distribution of their firmware / DSPcode in the Free Software community. Next step is to obtain really libre firmwares (source provided), this is maybe possible when chipsets become obsolete?
This announcement has been obtained after 4 months of work by Ikanos (first bêta driver in July 2006) and with the help of Sagem that provides Fast 800 E4 for the french ADSL ISP Orange. It becomes possible to work at supporting this new hardware (whose firmware / DSPcode can be distributed with a clearly identified license) by the free driver ueagle-atm.
To be fair and not too euphoric at this distribution, the following issues remain to be addressed:
- availability of source code for a really libre distribution (delayed a bit if needed)
- provide a fully operational free driver for eagle4 chipset (bêta provided for the driver eagle-usb4 is promising but not integrated to the Linux kernel)
- availability of source code for free distribution of USB firmware / DSPcode for obsolete chipsets (adi930, eagle I, II & III) already supported by ueagle-atm.
This step is a significative advance towards Free Software, since more than 3 years that the eagle-usb driver was published free (GPL). Let's hope it will give good ideas to other vendors / providers of hardware that require drivers: the immediate adoption of free software would enable them to address the expectations of users (buyers) with hardware immediately working for GNU/Linux et *BSD.
