Earlier this year there were accusations against OpenHAL and that the code would intrude on Atheros’ proprietary HAL code. The Software Freedom Law Center which was asked to investigate the matter has come to the conclusion that OpenHAL does not infringe on Atheros code. This means that the development of a wireless network hardware access layer (HAL) for Linux can continue. This should open up the possibility to support wireless networking directly in the kernel. We are very glad to receive these news as wireless networking is one of the things that needs to be improved with Linux to make it a truly complete desktop platform. Wireless networking does indeed work well with most of the current distributions, but then use Atheros proprietary HAL.
