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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."
Isn't it about hardware mediated DRM?
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.
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..
"-Who said sit down?!"
-- S. Ballmer @ MSDC 2003.
But, the interview is interesting.
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.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
Stick Men
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.
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.
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
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
"-Who said sit down?!"
-- S. Ballmer @ MSDC 2003.
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)
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.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
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:
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.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
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?
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
RTFA
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.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
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.
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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
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. 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.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