Microsoft Taking Over the BIOS

dtjohnson writes "According to this story, Microsoft has entered into an agreement with BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies to integrate the BIOS with Windows. This has the potential to turn PCs into Windows-only machines and also could result in widespread incorporation of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology into new PCs. It looks like Microsoft is beginning to flex their marketplace monopoly muscles again, after taking a couple of years off."

Comments

JUST in the sake of fairness...

[JayBlalock]

I feel compelled to point out that there's nothing in the article SAYING the bios would prevent other OSes from being installed. Nor, from the description, there is no reason it would have to happen, unless it was deliberately implemented.

MicroSoft is undoubtedly up to no good with this, but we don't need to go Chicken Little without a little more evidence...

Re:Thank goodness for LinuxBIOS

[Tauvix]

According to the LinuxBIOS page, they have successfully booted Win2k off of LinuxBIOS.

The biggest thing I see as a problem is the limited motherboard support of the project. However, I suspect that after the first one or two motherboards come out with this new MS-BIOS on it, community support for porting LinuxBIOS will increase.

DRM will be optional.

[zeekiorage]

Right at the end of the article you will notice that the users will have an option to turn off the DRM...

Phoenix said the DRM-enabled CME was not part of Microsoft's NGSCB, but that the technology was complementary. The CME would allow PC makers to embed digital rights management directly into the hardware, though they would have the option of allowing users to turn it off.

Re:Is this bad?

[ydnar]

Macs havent had a BIOS for years--not in the traditional sense anyway. They use Open Firmware, an architecturally-neutral BIOS replacement (originally?) developed by Sun. It's pretty nifty...

More info here.

Re:Alternative

[cygnus]

Why go from an x86 with propriety BIOS to PPC with propriety BIOS?

what makes you think it's proprietary? it's not. it's called Open Firmware and it's an IEEE standard.

Open, as in, not proprietary, and you can hack it yourself easily, if you feel like learning Forth.

Re:Thank goodness for LinuxBIOS

[inquisitor]

AMI maybe, but http://www.award.com redirects to http://www.phoenix.com/en/home/.

Phoenix have owned Award for quite some time, and practically every board I've seen lately has had an Award/Phoenix BIOS. AMI are making their money mostly on RAID solutions right now.

On the original story: from the press release on Phoenix's site, it looks like the byline might be a bit OTT (ain't it always?). Basically, it looks just like a turfing-out of legacy crud, turning the BIOS into something more like OpenFirmware or a mainframe BIOS. Just because it's in conjunction with Microsoft doesn't always mean it's a bad thing, but we've got to wait and see.

Re:Thank goodness for LinuxBIOS

[willtsmith]

Don't forget about Dual-BIOS motherboards. One could be a WinBIOS, the other a Linux BIOS.

Re:Same as what Apple does

[moof1138]

"Apple's special BIOS" is called Open Firmware. And it is called 'Open' for a reason - it is a documented open standard (IEEE 1257) that Apple implemented. Sun and IBM amonug others also use Open Firmware on their systems - it is enough of a standard that Apple engineers have referred people to Sun's docs on Open Firmware on the listservs in the past. The Mac OS may need Open Firmware to boot, but there is nothing preventing anyone from bootstrapping any other OS, and various PPC Linuxes and BSDs all use OF to bootstrap.