Re: Open hardware wireless cards

[mcgrof@studorgs.rutgers.edu (Luis R. Rodriguez)]

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On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 09:02:07AM +0100, Norbert van Nobelen wrote:
> You don't have to buy a company. There are white label manufacturers which are 
> happy to produce any card you like 

Excellent

> (but how big will the volume be?). 

Maybe 100 / month?

> The point is just to find or design the chipset, from there on the card.

Ok lets try giving this a shot by seeing if we can get a company to let
another manufacture a specific card design for us.  We can do this by
getting people to sign up for the card once we have details. Once we
reach a threshold we charge all users and order in-bulk to the
manufacturer. How's this sound? We can use linuxwireless.org for this.

I'll see if I can get people from Conexant to agree to let us use the
old fullmac chipset design for starters, since we already have that
driver in the stock kernel.

> What is also possible, is just to design an open chipset like the openrisc 
> guys did: They designed and published the design of a risc processor under I 
> believe GPL (have to look it up).
> If you let companies use that design to produce their open card, you will have 
> solved the problem. Companies like Trust (Dutch white label company: Buy a 
> stack of stuff, and put Trust label on it), will probably pick this up

Cool we should get an estimate to see how many cards they'd need in
order to start a bulk order.

	Luis

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