ScratchMonkey

But switching distros won't solve a driver problem when the issue is that the distro can't legally give you a necessary file.

The problem was that the procedure for getting the file required a fair amount of understanding of how drivers are organized and how to use the command line. It's as if you got a Windows driver that made you fetch a Linux tarball, extract firmware from it, install it to some magic location (that varies with each version of Windows), and then hack the registry to make it visible. Windows drivers tend to encapsulate all this mess in installers laboriously figured out by driver authors. (Who I've personally witnessed throw things while figuring this stuff out.)

If Broadcomm had made this file legally transferrable by the Linux driver packager, we wouldn't be in this mess. All the distros could easily deploy it in their own official way.

A similar problem has blocked Java from becoming popular on Linux. Sun only recently changed licensing and open sourced a lot of Java to make it easier to use existing distro packaging systems to deploy it.

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