Comment Re:How about the FCC just does its job? (Score 0) 173
The FCC has, over the last couple of decades, gone a long way toward outsourcing radio regulation. Now, they're predominantly a finance agency conducting spectrum auctions and counting on competitors to police each other. Often, this actually works. Sometimes it doesn't. To be sure, they do have some field-based, rapidly-responding capability to identify interference, especially for (and between!) public safety users, and they occasionally use this to levy big fines to scare everyone else into compliance - I wouldn't want to absorb the typically $11K fine, personally. But their enforcement division is nothing like it used to be.
As far as what used to be called "type approval" (the pre-marketing certification that a device is compliant), it is now 100% outsourced. The fees for this run between $100K and $500K, depending on the complexity of the device and the section of the FCC regs you have to be compliant with (47CFR). 47CFR95 devices are cheap, 47CFR90 devices aren't. 47CFR5 devices can (usually) be self-certified, but they can't be sold.
So, unless Open Source drivers can be sold and operated under Part 5, and it's totally not evident to me that they can, then certification cost is going to mean that someone if going to have to pick a tiny handful of reference devices, certify some binary blobs, and call it done. My guess is that those someones would be Red Hat and quite possibly Lenovo - the one and only marketable Linux Laptop would perhaps be enough of a niche to pursue. In principle, someone like, say, Intel could certify a blob for a mezzanine card and sell the card to vendors, but bear in mind this means the antenna must be fixed onto the card and certified as a package.
Sorry to be such a downer...