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

Re:Bah

[DrJAKing]

Isn't it about hardware mediated DRM?

Re:Bah

[akaiONE]

One key factor to wanting to develop a free BIOS or "BIOS-like" solution to the startupsequence is that unlike what most endusers are aware of, the BIOS is a pain. Its slow, consumes a lot of bootup time and really isnt needed much longer. A free alternative would provide the user with shorter bootup times and more control over their own hardware. BIOS at its current state are just there for hardware detection/error handling and checking availability of an OS. The LinuxBIOS-project have reduced the bootup time consumed to just 5 seconds afaik. Thats really a lot less than the current BIOSes out there. Most of todays operating systems discards whatever the BIOS provide them and probe hardware directly anyways..

Link has little info about bios

[hobo2k]

Okay, at first I thought the submitter was on crack. The interview has nothing to do with free bios stuff. The only relavent statement is this:

However, I think that development of a free BIOS is particularly important. The main obstacle is that computer manufacturers have not released all the information necessary to do the work. We are looking for companies willing to cooperate with the community in this way.

Big deal, of course hardware manufacturers don't like to release the details of the hardware.

But, the interview is interesting.

Re:Bah

[Trogre]

An incentive like they received from Microsoft to implement Palladium, perhaps?

Yes, the current system works just fine, but the fact is that the current system is not going to be with us much longer. It looks like tomorrows system is going to be what sinister groups like Microsoft make it. One that only lets 'signed' code run. Looked at an Xbox lately?

It is this that I believe Stallman is trying to prevent.

Steps Against DRM

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

What with all the talk of embedding DRM into the BIOS itself, I'm not surprized Stallman has come out with the idea of a GPL based BIOS. What happens when every single part of the computer must be a pice of 'trusted' software, i.e. restricted software. If this project goes ahead, maybe we'll all have an alternative to what an industry too scared of litigation forces on us.

Some might consider the FSF and Stallman in paticular, to be too zealous in their pursuit of a totally open system, but given the upsurge in patenting, litigation, copyrght restrictions and DMCA style laws, the computing world is becoming a much harsher place for those who want to do, what they want to do, with their own computers. At the moment we have only operating systems restricting our rights on our own PCs. What happens if the PCs themselves contain the restrictions? How far will these restrictions go? How long before PCs come with restrictive EULA and can be repossessed for (suspected) infrigement? Already we can't mod chip our PS2s. What about our PCs? When they get region locking, will we be allowed to mod them? At least a libre BIOS might affors us some protection.

I just wonder, if trusted computing comes into vouge, will a non DRM BIOS be considered a device for circumventing copyright, and get banned under the DMCA. All the more reason to get it established soon, before newer more ridiculous laws are passed.

Re:Steps Against DRM

[mwa]

Now go ahead and mark me a troll for having an unpopular opinion.

Naa. It's not that you're a troll. It's just that you've fallen into the trap of contemporary thinking that most software is commercial software. That's simply not true. Most corporations have more lines of code for internal applications than MS Windows and the Linux kernel combined.

The fact is that the vast majority of that code is pure expense. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Payroll, Inventory control, etc., applications have been re-written thousands of times by different companies. It's only fairly recently that commercial packages for these have become available for "enterprise" use. They are expensive and can require changes to business processes that make a particular company's operation less efficient overall. Either that or pony up for consulting hours or source licenses to make custom modifications that have to be retrofitted into new realeases as they become available.

The bottom line is that if companies worked together to develop an open source suite of application components, each company's expenses would be lowered. Programmers would still be employed to compose the overall system so that it suits the companies management, organizational model and business processes. Programmers would still be employed to contribute to the open source process because it would be cheaper than recurring licensing costs and improve business effeciency.

And that only addresses business-related applications. IT is a hotbed of opportunities for cost reduction through participation in open source projects. Any company with an IT organization faces the same challenges: How do we manage all these network devices, servers, workstations, etc.? How do we get notified of a problem before the business is impacted so we can prevent a disruption of income? You can buy into the OpenView/Tivoli/Unicenter/etc. mega-management framework/suite/nightmare (which may impose artificial and arbitrary restrictions on your systems and network infrastucture) and spend big $$ in administration and "management of the management", or you can employ open source developers to work on projects with other companies facing the same issues. The price tags of these suites plus support labor most likely exceeds the cost of paying the same number of staff a little bit more for development experience.

Plus, I'll wager all my karma that any company running one (or more) of the big NMS suites has a variety of open source applications (MRTG, Nagios, NMIS, etc.) deployed as "point solutions" to fill gaps that it's just to painful to try to fill with the commercial products. We have one (unnamed) commercial performance management system that is licensed by the number of nodes monitored. The constant growth in our network combined with the traditional big-company purchasing bureaucracy means we never have enough licenses to monitor everything properly. So we either play the license shell game (moving licenses to nodes in the current hotspots) or we go look at NMIS for free.

Slowly, management has come around to the fact that open source deployment is faster, if not as flashy, as far more expensive commercial applications and at least as effective. They came to that realization because when problems came up they saw with their own eyes that our open source tools had the answers and the commercial products didn't because the commercial products were not licensed to "see" the problem.

Where they have not gone yet is understanding that since the open source applications are not as robust and flashy as they would like, they can fix that by letting staff participate on those projects to make them even more suitable to our environment. What have we got to lose? We spend enourmous labor hours on maintenance of servers and commercial software that doesn't quite meet our needs. How about we drop licensing costs, quite fighting applications (and vendors) to get them to do what we need, and spen

Re:Bah

[akaiONE]

I think the boot time advantage is not worth the trouble.

Maybe boot time alone does not fully justify a free opensource BIOS alternative, but what about boot time combined with better hardwarecontrol (ie allowing the user to tweak performance?), and the option of "hotbooting" bypassing the entire BIOS and letting the OS run the show. This is a very interesting area and I hope development are allowed to happen :)

Re:Bah

[Florian]

I realize RMS has good intentions but I don't see any point to this. It's a BIOS. What good would making it GNU/BIOS do?

I wonder how this could be moderated insightful. The proprietary nature of BIOSes severely cripple the usefulness of PCs today and destroys their long-term value because support of modern modern hardware features doesn't get backported to BIOSes of older PCs. Some examples:

1. The nightmare that is ACPI and its support under free OSes could be fixed with free BIOS/firmware replacements
2. Hardly any BIOS supports booting from USB devices (external drives or USB memory sticks), this could be easily fixed as well
3. A free BIOS/firmware could implement a generic way of booting computers from the network, without the need of onboard boot ROMs (and proprietary net boot schemes) in Ethernet adapters
4. A free BIOS/firmware could even implement interfaces to access and set up the BIOS remotely via network or serial consoles. This would remove a big showstopper that makes x86 commodity hardware with Linux/*BSD still inferior to the proprietary RISC/Unix systems of Sun et.al.
5. Older BIOSes (for Pentium I/II/K6 motherboards) don't recognize harddisks above 30 GB, forcing owners to throw away hardware that can would still perform reasonably under Linux or *BSD.
6. Other older BIOSes don't support booting from CD, thus making OS installations or use of rescue CDs difficult
7. The quality of IRQ management and fine-tuning options for hardware parameters, for example, vastly differs between current BIOS implementations, getting a good BIOS is thus a lottery.

A generic, free BIOS/firmware could thus (a) bring BIOSes to new, desirable levels of functionality [see above], make (b) BIOS user interfaces consistent across heterogenous computers, and (c) finally allow consumers to choose motherboards based on hardware quality only.

open bios

[Anonymous Coward]

All you PC kiddies, who havnt used say, a sun box, dont know what you are missing.

Whilst you may think that a bios is only usefull for tweeking memory timings to get a few more FPS from games, there are loads more things that it can do. For example on a sparc you can do memory, network and scsi tests at a low level before any OS gets to mess with the hardware. You can even program in forth at the OK prompt.
The ability to boot off the network is now in place on most modern bioses, but that has come about as a direct result of having it on server class bioses for years.

The fact that there is a full on TTY driver in the sun bios, means that you can plug the serial out into a another box and have full access to all aspects of the bios remotely. This may not seem much of a big deal to home users, but to a sysadmin it could save you hours of travel. Then there is the fact that you can change bios params. from within the OS.

Modern bioses by just havnt kept pace with modern hardware. There is a monopoly by a few companies, all pushing out a similar product that has just the minimum functions to run the box.

Whilst people may or may not love Stallman due to his abrasive nature youve got to admit that without him, there would be no linux, no GNU and a lot of us would be out of a job.

So, when M$ mandates that all mother board manufacturers uses a bios like that on the Xbox, or their OS wont run on the box, who will they listen to ?? A load of linux "loonies" of a multi billion dollar corp ??

Yes we have hacked Xbox to run linux, but its been patched and the linux hacks are getting harder and harder.

Now under DMCA if you bypass a copy protection you are almost a terrorist. How many of our employers are going to run linux, if its illegal to bypass the bios to install it?

Re:OpenBIOS, Open Standard

[Stonent1]

Standardizing a bios on something such as Open Firmware will fix a lot of platform issues. Such as having to make video cards for macs and video cards for PCs. (or scsi or ide or anything that requires its own firmware)

Sun resells Mac Radeon 7000 cards as Sun XVR-100 cards (for about 300$) because OF allows it to work. Sun even admits they are Mac Radeon cards

Re:The momentum is pushing him away...

[FrostedChaos]

Actually, I think I am pretty safe from this glorified copy protection bullshit.

We broke it back in the 80s when it first came out... we're breaking it now, and we'll break it in the future.

This kind of specification could only work if all hardware conformed to it... which will never happen, for a lot of good reasons. First of all, there is a lot of perfectly good legacy hardware floating around, that has no "copy protection" functionality whatsoever. For example, I have a microphone jack and an old PC. That is enough to allow me to make sound recordings of anything, DRM protected or not.

Secondly... there are plenty of foreign companies that will supply the necessary hardware for breaking this crap, if it comes to that. For example, I really doubt communist china will try to prevent people from developing and selling hacked DRM BIOS chips, etc. In fact, they may even encourage this sort of thing. They have little interest in being economically enslaved to "content producing" nations like the U.S.

Don't forget, a lot of semiconductor fabs are located overseas, to avoid harsh environmental regulations here in the U.S. Well, guess what... U.S. law does not apply there.

Even if there weren't foreign havens for piracy, there would always be clever individuals able and willing to break the system. Like illegal drugs, information will always be available to those willing to spend the time and effort-- and maybe the money-- to find them.

I'm more afraid of boneheaded lawas that restrict fair use... like the DMCA. I've never seen a copy protection scheme that I couldn't break, given the time. I have seen a lot of court cases that I couldn't win, and I have no wish to be involved in one.

Re:Bah

[FireFury03]

A lot of BIOSes have broken implementations of stuff (see the likes of ACPI for examples) - opensourcing the BIOS would be really useful for getting this kind of thing fixed. Especially since a lot of kit is still in use long after the manufacturers have finished caring about it - open BIOSes would allow people to fix BIOS bugs after the manufacturer has stopped bothering to release firmware updates.

Rebuttal

[Christ-on-a-bike]

OK, I was going to mod you flamebait but I think I should rebut your meandering efforts instead.

RMS will complain that the blueprints of the CPUs aren't public

No. RMS has never asked hardware manufacturers to expose their blueprints, only their interfaces. RMS might well complain if the interfaces of the CPUs were protected by NDAs, patents, or secrecy.

Now if the interfaces involve encryption, and keys are not available to free software, then certainly a lot of people, not just RMS, would complain. But it seems unlikely that this will happen, since the large chip companies make money from Linux-on-x86 sales.

RMS's philosophy that the only kind of software is the kind that you can not only have the rights to change and republish but also to tinker with in any way is directly in contrast with the philosophy of Capitalism

You seem really keen on this, but it is false. The only way RMS contradicts capitalism is that he refuses to admit the crude monetisation of so-called 'intellectual property'. RMS instead says: ideas are not property. And our existing copyright and patent laws in fact state this.

The capitalist system will optimize out the industry. I don't drink RMS's cool aid, though

OK, at this point I have no idea what you are talking about. Free software is not going to destroy the computing industry, although it might cause some unemployment (just like other disruptive market changes). Surely "people who are smart enough and motivated enough" can cope with that.