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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."
Stallman is going to have to find a serious financial hook to lure companies with.
Hardware vs. Software is starting to be viewed as the last outpost of the fight to save capitalism in the Software industry.
If he's really serious, he'll find an investor who can't quite break in yet and try to nail down that niche.
Isn't Microsoft looking to create a nasty piece of BIOS (or no BIOS) which would lock down a system beyond the belief of most persons who aren't "well educated" WRT technology; i.e., the people who wouldn't have a need for tinkering with the system.
No. Microsoft and others have created a nasty piece of technology including BIOS modifications which, working with other modifications and additions to standard PC hardware, will not only lock users out of performing certain actions but could be used to allow total control over end user machines by Microsoft or the government (or your personal least favorite organization), regardless of how tech-savvy the end user might be.
Being smart does not make you safe.
Don't reply about how you can always gain complete control of your own hardware with enough technical knowledge and time. Read Ross Anderson's TCPA FAQ too see why that still applicable bit of security wisdom isn't sufficient to throw off the yoke of TC. Go here for all the technical nitty gritty if you're not still convinced.
Why is that so natural? It used to be, when you bought a computer you got the entire schematic and a complete description of all the hardware registers. Up until the 16-bit generation you could buy that documentation for a small price - I know, I still have my "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual" gathering dust somewhere at home.
But all of a sudden it is no longer possible. Why?
I can at least tell you this: it isn't because hardware API's, all of a sudden, have become so unique, so incredibly advanced, that just telling people about register layout would cause vital secrets to escape the company. So having gotten that out of the way, why then?
It could be argued that it is a hassle actually writing documentation. But this cannot be the problem: the documentation must still exist for those few people who write drivers today. So that isn't it either.
Then it is possible that some sort of licensing scheme prohibits the companies from actually making the information public. Licensing from whom, I wonder? Who benefits from keeping this information locked up? I won't answer this one, but I bet you can guess...
AMD has seen the light and has become the most forthcoming of all chipset vendors, so Athlon and Opteron motherboards tend to be very well supported. (VIA, by contrast, is still a problem). Tyan has a full-time LinuxBIOS engineer, and several system vendors, among Linuxnetworx, ship machines with LinuxBIOS installed.
They have solved the VGA init problem by importing an 8086 emulator that (strangely) runs faster than the hardware version in P4 and Athlon. For x86 they have a funny compiler called romcc that uses registers as main memory, for use before the memory controller has been initialized. (Opteron doesn't need it because ~450 bytes of the cache works as RAM immediately after power-up.) What the project needs most now is some institutional support, so they can run regression tests on all the hardware they support.
The project is far from dead: they are fixing to release major version 2. When will it be ready? Sooner if you help.
With all due respect you seem to be stuck on the free as in beer. There is far more to open source that that. I particularly like that, using your analogy, this "soup kitchen" not only gives away soup, but provides the recipe so I can improve it. Or take their soup and use it in a burger recipe. And I can charge for delivery if I like!
It would kinda suck if the soup kitchens of the world put out the restaurants... I rather like eating out.
Hey buddy, you're quite free to walk into a soup kitchen RIGHT NOW and eat. Why don't you? Likely because the restaurant makes much better food, has much better ambience, much better service and also serves wine with the meal (They even have better soup!).
The problem with your analogy is that right now, the soup kitchens are making the better food, PLUS wine and a cab ride home. FOR FREE. If the soup kitchen can continue to make better food, and provide better service, good riddance to the restaurant.
But some of the restaurants are learning : Look at Novell, IBM, HP... they've got the idea : they've put soup kitchens IN their restaurants. They give the soup, and sell you tasty bread to go with it. They let you walk to the buffet for free, or you can pay to have a waiter!
If you, or your restaurant can't accept and adapt to that, well... looks like you and your wife won't be eating out much longer.
Don't be such a soup nazi! :P
"The problem with socialism is that [...]"
Socialism? Karl Marx did not invent sharing. At the end of the day, sharing is the heart of RMS's philosophy.
Communism and socialism both encompass a great many things that I've never heard RMS advocating.
"[...] but it is still charity. The OSS community is a socialist community."
Um, I hate to be argumentetive about this, but honestly if you equate charity with socialism then you don't understand one or the other.
"Now go ahead and mark me a troll for having an unpopular opinion."
I'd be just fine with an 'unpopular' opinion, but a flat out misinformed opinion is pretty unacceptable.
"I don't drink RMS's cool aid"
How could you when you are already drunk on Gates' champagne? Your arguments betray a profound misunderstanding if the nature of charity and philanthropy and it's role in a capitalist society.
-Tom