Today at the Kernel Introduction Keith Packard corrected Jonathan Corbet and said that the Linux ipw3945 wireless driver no longer requires a binary regulatory daemon to run. After poking around the Sourceforge project website for a second I couldn’t find the code and asked Keith about it.
It turns out the binary free project is now hosted at bughost.org. At this time the new driver requires running linux-wireless git tree so it isn’t easy to use and build like the old driver but the lack of a binary userspace daemon should guarantee that the code is merged into mainline sometime in the future. Thanks to Intel for finding a better solution to this.