Stallman Pushes For Free BIOS

An anonymous reader writes "One key area that Richard Stallman, GNU project founder, hopes to develop is an OSS-based BIOS. But his work has been hindered by PC manufacturers who haven't been receptive to the idea. Stallman told Builder AU that: 'we're looking for companies willing to cooperate with the community in this way.' On challenges facing developers today, Stallman said the worst was the proliferation of laws that explicitly ban free software for certain jobs."

Comments

OpenBIOS, Open Standard

[turgid]

OpenBIOS is what you want, and unlike LinuxBIOS, it's implementing an Open Standard too, as used by IBM, Apple and Sun : IEEE 1275-1994 or Open Firmware.

Treacherous Computing

[tepples]

And what on earth is the problem with existing BIOS's?

Their makers are involved in Treacherous Computing Group, whose specification relies on keeping information secret from the owner of a piece of computer hardware in order to be able to sell you a computer capable of doing less.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

but the project seems to have stalled. They've got a website at www.linuxbios.org, but their supported motherboards list is small and hasn't grown much for a while. Stallman's imput may get things moving again in this area. I, for one, am tired of having motherboards with terminal bugs in the Bios which the motherboard manufactuors can't be bothered fixing. 3rd party hacked Bioses like Jan's efforts only go so far.

Re:More like Open Vapour

[oxygene2k2]

I'm one of the authors of openbios.

so far openbios runs on emulators (MOL; pearpc and qemu are in the works) and native hardware (amd64, ppc - the latter still awaiting integration, iirc), as well as various hosted modes for development (hosted on unix, from grub - which allows to work on OF support in operating systems without having to reflash the bios)

Re:Bah

[cmarkn]

Insightful? No. It has nothing to do with what you would have to pay money for. That's free as in beer. This is about free as in speech; even though the motherboard manufacturers may charge money for it, you would have access to read and modify the application.

Re:x86 Bios problem?

[TheRaven64]

Modern Macs, Suns and PowerPC CHRP systems all use Open Firmware, which is a significantly nicer boot system than a standard PC BIOS. As another poster pointed out, there is a free implementation available. Moving the x86 world to Open Firmware would be beneficial to hardware manufacturers, since they would only need to write a single piece of ROM code, rather than one for x86 and one for (almost) everything else. It would be some effort for operating system developers, since operating systems would have to be modified to boot from Open Firmware (not a problem for Linux, *BSD, etc, since they already support OF on non-x86 platforms).

Re:What laws?

[Yaa 101]

RTFA

Re:Link has little info about bios

[runderwo]

Patents have become a big problem in recent years. It is much easier to simply not publish your documentation, than the alternative: to publish it (either openly or under NDA), have a competitor catch wind of your design and locate some vague patent they have that seems to cover some aspect of it, and spend years in a costly court battle, only to end up cross-licensing your valuable portfolio just to avoid being sunk by deliberately anti-competitive licensing fees.

It's only going to get worse from here on out. Ironically, while the patent system was originally designed to encourage publication, it is rife with problems currently which actually encourage secrecy, because that's the only way to avoid being the target of a lawsuit over some vague concept that a competitor happened to hold a patent on. Of course, you will have your own patents on vague concepts, so it's only a matter of who fires first. The hope with the secrecy approach is that nobody fires, because in the end the only winners are the lawyers.