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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."
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Vote for Pedro
if you meant that shared ownership implies communism, it logically follows that any company with more than one shareholder is communistic.
That's ridiculous. We're not talking about "shared" ownership, we're talking about FORCED shared ownership, also known as confiscation. I wasn't very clear in the sentence you're replying to, but I think you understood me. Forced sharing is communism, as the world has known communism so far. The analogy is harsh, but at least it makes clear why you're never going to get companies to willing agree to do such a thing...so we're back to having to force it on them. It just won't work in a free country. That's not to say it won't work at all, as your example URLs illustrate, I'm just saying you're never going to get a complete, cutting edge computer system with communistic techniques, because it depends on too many vendors either willingly submitting to the idea (won't happen), or being forced to submit to the idea (shouldn't happen in a free society).
AFAIK most open source projects are (or at least started as) the work of people, not corporations.
That's something that I hope will change. I think we're on the same team here. Corporations are notoriously stubborn, and they certainly need encouragement. What better way to convince them that open source is good, than to hand them a juicy platter of quality software that they can build upon to get a leg up on their non-open source competitors? If they can do that, they won't mind having to release their source, just don't take away the competitive advantage by forcing them to release the source before they can recoup their costs!
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.
That's exactly what I'm bemoaning (and lamenting). Companies aren't going to add features unless they can make a profit by doing it. Now, imagine if companies could make a profit...presto! We get new features. Now imagine that after the company's made it's profit, they're forced to release their source. Now you have the source to some great code that never would have existed unless somebody got paid to make it. As an added bonus, imagine that the company decides it needs to make more money, since the gravy-train ended after it released it's source. So what do they do? Add even more features, and release yet another iteration of the product.
If you understand how a capitalistic economy works, I don't have to explain to you why motivating companies to keep producing improved versions of their products is a good thing. However, I'd like to point out that after a company releases it's source, there'll be other companies adding features as well, in the same COPY, EXTEND, SELL, and then RELEASE cycle.
Basically, what I've just described is the snowball-effect on software evolution that the GPL hoped to achieve, but didn't. The GPL has worked, don't get me wrong, it just hasn't worked as well as it might have if it were able to convince money-motivated businesses to participate as well.