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Stallman Calls For Action on Free BIOS
Dolda2000 writes "Seeking to achieve 100% software freedom, RMS is now calling for action for a free BIOS. From the article: "The most uncooperative company is Intel, which has started a sham 'open source' BIOS project. The software consists of all the unimportant parts of of a BIOS, minus the hard parts. It won't run, and doesn't bring us any closer to a BIOS that does. It is just a distraction. By contrast, AMD cooperates pretty well." For reference, there are currently two projects for a free BIOS that I know of: LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS."
It makes sense, to me anyways, to have an open bios. How can one claim to run a free system when their very boot process is hidden and secretive?
I can't really imagine a free piece of software that will undoubtedly render some people's motherboards totally unusable.
Admittedly, not many people actually screw up their motherboards today because of company-supplied BIOS updates, but in my opinion the most likely reason for that is that most people don't update their motherboard's BIOS.
I think this is a necessary problem to solve for a host of reasons (the most pressing in my mind being removing "Trusted Computing Initiatives" or DRM) but I can't imagine who might be willing to distribute such a thing because of the liability concerns.
I'm a big tall mofo.
to create "free" BIOS help Intel? Would gain market share? Would it somehow end up with a new revenue stream that it cannot access with its current marketing and other strategies? What can it gain by winning over a bunch of geeks?
This is not flame bait. I am just trying to understand why corporations like Intel would cooperate.
All I can say is stop whining and move on.
BP http://www.card-central.com
An open-source BIOS is something I'd really appreciate having, especially with the big corporations moving towards their big 'Trusted Computing' platform. It's MY hardware and I'll runn whatever the hell I want on it, not what some mega-corporate conglomerate decides I should.
The problem with a motherboard BIOS is that it's tailored to the motherboard. Could the open source fratenity actually produce a workable product across a large number of motherboards? Would they produce something that works properly on all of them, instead of having modules that have been got to a state where they're good enough for the hacker creating them, but not Joe average on the street.
To be honest, if it's just a BIOS clone, I won't be interested anyway - wake me up when someone recreates OpenFirmware for the PC.
It might just be me being naïve, but would Intel really go to such lengths to create a "distraction"? I find it a bit paranoid to think they'd start a project with the sole intention of just slowing down the progress for an open sourced BIOS.
Come on. Intel only started their project in the past couple years. If you can't finish Hurd on your own, don't gripe about other projects which aren't moving fast enough for you. Or, hey, maybe you could look in the other kernels... you know, the Open Source kernels which aren't owned by the FSF. They seem to be able to do the job. They've been running all this time, while Hurd hasn't.
Sure, you're going to say Hurd runs. Well, where's the GNU/GNU Distro?
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This makes it even more critical that we get free software BIOSes, and soon!
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
This is a greatly injust comment to the man who started the free software movement. Please note that RMS is the man behind gcc, the most important free piece of software in existance.
A most certain bias towards freedom, liberty, and the ability to control your own way.
:)
I agree, its a bias!
Everyone should support and increase the compatibility of OpenBIOS!
OpenFirmware is the best BIOS standard ever, the joy of being able to code
from the command line and have non-interrupt-hijacking calls to the firmware,
a rudimentary HAL etc. is absolutely 100% cool.
It won't improve your Windows experience but who the hell cares about that?
It already has the support of Apple, Sun, SGI and IBM, comes in 32 and 64bit
versions in the standard, has a framebuffer, text console that redirects to
serial, video etc. automatically, blah blah blah.. Intel won't support it
because they like EFI.
But forget Intel too
Everyone should move to PowerPC, but then call me biased..
I'm sorry, but you're making a wrong assumption: this is not a zero-sum game. A zsg would require a situation where every gain on your opponent's side is a loss for you. Software development doesn't work that way. If you "invest" in creating new software that's freely shared you increase the pie, so to speak. By allowing other people to use your work and not requiring them to re-invent the wheel there is a net gain for the community, including you, since you benefit from others. This is a principle that might be hard to understand for someone who accepts the tenets of capitalism as the only ones possible (I do not wish to insult you, but many Americans seem terribly narrow-minded and uninformed in that respect, having been tought from childhood that everything related to communism is "bad" without ever going into detail).
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
RMS is not only the last person I would expect to put ego above cause, he is one of the few people in the world who truely understands what he started.
I wish people would just chill about the guy.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
isn't the whole point of "Trusted Computing" to keep us from circumventing DRM?
Right now I'm running an AMI bios, a VIA chipset and an AMD processor. Shouldn't an open-source BIOS be subject to regular standards organizations, rather than a vendor?
It hasn't been done yet (to my knowledge) but that shouldn't stop you right?
Reading your text I think you have a few misconceptions on what Open Firmware is and which features it provides. I suggest reading this very insightful introduction.
If you are an embedded systems engineer, what do you think about alternate approaches like Tinyboot?
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
And who exactly, when they've spent years working on a project on nothing more than blood sweat and tears and not a few Mountain Dews, is going to allow a company to come in, fork their code, write their own extensions, and keep them locked up ad infinitum?
The answer is no one. No one who does open source for fun, for the purity aspect will want to do this (Although I imagine there are a few masochists out there who don't understand dual licensing). Companies who want to do open source will do something like Sun and their CDDL, or won't do OSS at all.
"I think Europeans stereotype Americans and their views too narrowly. It makes America easier to understand for them maybe."
Yes, OR maybe that's an easy excuse to downplay any critique on Amerikans and the USA from us europeans.
For sure, there is a danger in using clichés and stereotypes, but it is also true, that those clichés *DO* hold a lot of water. Actually, I can't say I know of any well-established cliché about the nature of a people, that didn't had some truth in it. And that includes those of my own people/country, even though I would be hardpressed to acknowledge them in public. (Something which most USA-citizens seem to have too, only in a bigger national-zealot-reflex manner).
But actually, they ARE true, to a large extend.
The danger comes from turning that cliché into an absolute viewpoint: that ALL europeans or americans are like that. Being rational and honest, no one can actually claim such a thing, of course. So, while I may think that, in general, the USA - and especially it's current government - is arrogant, narrow-minded, uncritical and downright hypocrite idiots, I temper this viewpoint with the knowledge the USA also had and has critical thinkers and rebels that show signs of independend thought, intelligence and a cosmopolitan attitude, like Carl Sagan, M.Moore, R.Stallman and some others I've come to know by their work. Those people certainly deserve respect.
It does not follow the USA as a whole deserves respect. Certainly not like things are going currently. However you want to turn it, you must realise that the USA is behaving like a bully, and is increasingly acting - especially since the end of the cold war - like the world is their backyard where they can do what they want.
This is not surprising, since they ARE currently the only true superpower left, and being the strongest (as bullies usually go), they think everything is permitted. Sooner or later, they will discover their error.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Theoretically, yes. But reverse-engineering is not as good as having access to specs. (and that's why RMS and others are asking to disclose them in the first place).
BTW, having people reverse engineer their hardware is not something they can influence, but they may choose to keep the specs secret (or offering access only under NDA).
How does something that directly contradicts reality get modded insightful ?
The current scarecrow to throw at your enemies is terrorism, not communism. Please follow your times.
Also, if you meant that shared ownership implies communism, it logically follows that any company with more than one shareholder is communistic.
AFAIK most open source projects are (or at least started as) the work of people, not corporations.
Um, isn't this exactly what the company releasing its code would want ? That anyone who distributes products based on the code must release any enhancments to the code under GPL as well ?
You do realize that just because you, the original author and copyright holder, released version 1.0 under the GPL, doesn't mean you that you are under any obligation to release version 1.0.1 under any license - assuming, of course, that you own the copyrights to all the code in version 1.0.1 ? Licenses are used togrant rights, under certain terms, to people who don't have the copyright to whatever is being licensed.
Or were you bemoaning over companies inability to take GPL'd code, add some features, and sell the result as their own proprietary product ? If so, keep on lamenting; you won't get any sympathy from me.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Offhand, I can think of three strong arguments for an OpenBIOS.
- Decreased obsolence: As others have noted, changes in BIOS requirements can be responded to given the BIOS source. BIOS maintenance is no longer at the whim of the hardware vendor. This could extend the useful life of hardware.
- Decreased HW lockout: As others have noted, the move toward "Trusted Computing" could easily take a sinister turn. An open BIOS would make it much harder for hardware vendors to lock out libre software.
- Increased OS compatibility: Many seem concerned about getting hardware compatibility right in an open BIOS. The flip side of this is that getting the BIOS to work with an open OS would become much easier. The premiere example is ACPI, where the BIOS often has bugs with corresponding Windows workarounds.
I think the goal of producing an open BIOS that works well on a number of machines is quite a difficult one. The rewards of achieving it, however, seem high.Have you READ that thing?
"This license may be modified at any time, even retroactively, by Zesiger Inc., or whoever it chooses to serve in it's stead, in order to preempt all possible legal issues which may pervert the intent of this license."
Retroactively modifying the terms under which I'm already using code? Sorry but I don't believe they took legal advice on that and I wouldn't touch anything that attempted anything so insane.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
99% of the time, the reason that people don't want to provide documentation for hardware is
A) because it doesn't exist
B) because if they release documentation, they might be compelled to support it, and
C) because they may not be able to change and evolve the interface if they have to due to unyielding consumer expectation
In that order.
Very rarely is it truly about trade secrets or competitive advantage.
I think any professional BIOS writers in the crowd will laugh at the thought of an army of open source writers writing a stable BIOS. Because even they struggle to do it with all the registers in front of them!
Real BIOSes really do have microsoft-specific hacks to make things work at all. Real BIOSes seldom get such basic things as ECC correct. Real BIOSes do have to work around specific errata for every chip on every unique board. Yes, that includes different boot code for a revCG AMD CPU versus a revE AMD CPU.
And real BIOSes go through some amount of testing *before* going into the field.
When you open-source BIOS you will see less stability, less lab-testing and way too much bad field testing, and way too much guesswork since you won't have all the register fields given too you. It will be quite horrendous, even though you may get BIOS updates more frequently they will all suck.
"Trusted Computing" used to be called "Palladium", but it got so trashed and exposed as an excuse for Microsoft to prevent anyone else from being able to read their files, and even potentially from being able to boot non-Palladium signed operating systems, that they changed the name. Richard Stallman was one of the people who was really raising red flags about its management of core parts of your hardware and denying access to other, non-Microsoft controlled software.
Like putting RFID tags in everyone's backside, there are real potential benefits but incredible social risks of the approach. And "Trusted Computing" is precisely one of the things that an open-source BIOS community would help manage and keep from doing things it blatantly *should not* do, such as be used to prevent motherboard makers from preventing you from using any OS other than their vendor-approved one (Windows).