(Solved)Why FreeBSD drivers for network card? Linux supports still wider range

Just wondering the rationale behind selecting FreeBSD drivers for network cards.
FreeBSD is used mostly on server applications, while Linux is choosen by many for their desktop, laptop, workstation. Naturally, the hardware would be wide-ranged, hence the network cards also and thus their needs for drivers supported
Just curious…can some body (from the inner circle!) elaborate?
Thanks

(By the way, I am forced to buy a PCIe wi-fi card since USB tethering to Android mobile is unsupported till now and I have to care fully select a model / brand now, for it to work on Haiku. My other HDD has Slackware14.2, I am not worried about the support here)

The reason is the licensing. Linux drivers mostly released under GPL, while the FreeBSD ones under BSD license.

Is GPL so problematic? If Haiku aims to be a free / open OS, then GPLV3 should not be a constraint…Are all Linux drivers under GPLV3? I think some are BSD, MIT etc

That’s not the only constraint. The other one is that Linux decided not to have a stable interface between the drivers and the kernel. They keep chaning the internals all the time. This means, by the time we have ported the drivers from one version, they will have changed a lot of things, and if we want to get a new version, we have major rework to do.

This isn’t as much the case with freeBSD, so in that case we only have some small updates to do with each FreeBSD release to get their new drivers.

And, yes, GPL is problematic for us, because there are some cases where Haiku is distributed together with closed source software (for example TuneTracker Systems does this - and in fact even our own distribution of Haiku does, we have non-free software in the package repositories).

3 Likes

Thsnks for the clarification