Not so hot news, but Atheros finally released the HAL source code under a Free Software license. Given that they always claimed it was because of the FCC, I now wonder where that argument will stand now.

Update: it appears that it is not the ath_hal source code. (source) As I understand it, it is the same source code that make ath_hal in MadWifi. This means that we can get a really Free Software madwifi. Apparently the ath5k authors are already using it to fix issues with the in-kernel driver.

Kudos to Atheros, you did the right thing.