Realistically, no, they always have been walking dead. Without special licenses, it always was illegal to drive radio hardware out of spec. It was just largely

Realistically, no, they always have been walking dead. Without special licenses, it always was illegal to drive radio hardware out of spec. It was just largely a grey area because of how incredibly hard it was to enforce compliance. While the hardware technically had shared-source firmware/drivers, you were never legally able to use it modified outside of specially shielded environments, so it's not "open" source in the true sense, and never was. Claiming that the FCC "is killing it" is a red herring, they're just enforcing laws that have been existing for longer than wifi. Should the laws restricting radio broadcasting be abolished? Maybe. (Accidentally jamming radars or EMT/police radios can be a huge risk.) Maybe not. (If someone wants to jam EMT/police radio or radars on purpose, they can build a better contraption without using off-the-shelf wifi hardware.) But focusing on open versus closed software is a red herring.