PhxBUG - Phoenix BSD User Group

Undeadly (the OpenBSD Journal) brings us this article, an open letter from Theo de Raadt to the open source community encouraging everyone to let Intel know how they feel about the company's unwillingness to provide open, unencumbered access to product documentation and firmware.

Without freely distributable firmware images, Intel customers who run on OpenBSD (and in some cases, other BSD and even GNU/Linux) operating systems will find that their OS projects of choice will not be able to provide support for Intel's chips. Who really wants to spend top dollars on Intel hardware and not be able to have it supported correctly in their favorite operating system?

Those willing to do so should email Majid Awad <majid.awad@intel.com> and let him know that Intel customers in the open source community want their vendor to stand behind them and their purchasing decisions.

Those not familar with the OpenBSD project's goals may benefit from some understanding of the request. Intel is a leading manufacturer of many popular networking chipsets; many 10/100 Mbps Ethernet adapters, Gigabit adapters, Wi-Fi adapters and more rely on Intel chipsets - especially many which ship in popular server, desktop, and laptop models. Intel is also a primary culprit of not providing open source projects with the resources they need to develop reliable support for hardware in the operating systems, making them an "unfriendly" vendor in general terms. OpenBSD holds as a primary goal the ability to produce an operating system that users may use freely, that can be distributed freely and openly, and as such will not succumb to Intel's rather unfriendly terms for firmware distribution. Without the ability to distribute firmware images freely and openly, the driver must remain crippled, forcing users to acquire and load firmware images manually or go through other restrictive means to acquire them in the first place. If Intel acquiesces to this request, and the request to open up documentation on their chipsets, OpenBSD developers can ship their OS with good support for the devices and produce open, unencumbered driver code under the BSD license, which can serve to benefit all open source projects as well.

For background on similar requests (and an interesting thread in general), read this.