Qualcomm: Release fully-free drivers for modern Wi-Fi chipsets!

(Confused about what this all means? There's an version of this article that explains what a kernel, drivers and firmware are here)

Chances are your system's Linux kernel uses non-free code to communicate with some of your hardware. Sometimes this is simply because you've installed a proprietary driver. However, many otherwise-free drivers often depend on uploading proprietary firmware to the hardware itself. Usually, this firmware is supplied only as bunch of unreadable numbers: a 'binary blob'. Drivers that use non-free firmware are especially common for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and video cards.

Drivers that aren't free — even in part — make us dependent on the companies that wrote them. Without source code, it's very difficult to investigate malfunctions and almost impossible to fix them. Only the company that owns the driver has the ability to do it for us and they may well decide that it's not in their interest to do so. If a driver is entirely non-free, it can't even be independently updated to work with newer kernel versions or rebuilt for new architectures.

When the inner workings of non-free drivers and firmware are secret, we're forced to take companies at their word that they operate as intended and don't contain malicious features. Useful research is also stymied. Fully-free drivers like ath9k have been the subject of dozens of academic papers investigating how wireless networking can be improved, all because their free license gives people the right to tinker and learn. What if the same could be true for even more hardware?

We should use hardware that works with fully-free drivers. Our independence is worth it.