Google Sponsors the LinuxBIOS project

Rockgod noted that "The LinuxBIOS project aims to take down the last barrier in Open Source systems by providing a free firmware (BIOS) implementation. LinuxBIOS celebrates its Sixth anniversary this year, and has an installed base of over 1 million LinuxBIOS systems. With the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that number is expected to exceed 10 million users in 2007. LinuxBIOS supports 65 mainboards from 31 vendors in v1 and another 56 mainboards from 27 vendors in v2"

Comments

It's not the last barrier

[ClosedSource]

to Open Source systems since the microprocessor and other PC hardware is not open.

Re:It's not the last barrier

[smittyoneeach]

What would be the point of a GPL hardware implementation to the individual user?
Who would have the skill (to say nothing of the fab) to make a change to the hardware, and then distribute it?

Re:Eternal game of catch-up?

[sgtrock]

If a motherboard vendor chooses to use the FOSS BIOS, then I would assume that the vendor would recognize that it was in their interest to make sure that any changes to the hardware elements on their motherboard lines would necessarily require that they demand that their parts vendors work with the FOSS BIOS project to make sure that the low level drivers are working correctly.

I suppose it's possible that such a motherboard vendor might want to donate engineering time and samples to the project as well. They would have to weigh the cost of that effort against a host of other costs; licensing costs to use Award or Phoenix, the size of the expected market for the combined product, etc. Show them that the FOSS BIOS will work for MS Vista and they'll have a real incentive to push for it. Tell them that the market will be limited to just Linux and *BSD and they'll probably lose interest really fast.

Re:Why bother?

[elgaard]

> Why would I care about the BIOS?

For the same reason you care about other programs being open. E.g.

- Fixing bug. Eg hibernate problems.

- Checking for bugs and backdoord.

- Improving it to your needs. E.g., I would like to be able to boot from USB-disks or a CFlash card in a PCI-adaptor.
Or I could remove unnecessary stuff and put in a shell. Or an SSH server i the BIOS.

- Performance. My BIOS is slow. It does a lot of unnecessary things.

- Consistency. Next time I get a new computer, it would be nice to have the same bios. A company might prefer to use the same BIOS on all computers.

OSS has benefits to non-coders.

[Kadin2048]

End users aren't going to modify their processors and have them fabricated, but then again, "end users" for the most part, aren't going to open up the source code to their applications and make any sort of nontrivial adjustments to them, and recompile them.

Writing code and recompiling a piece of software is almost as much a black art to most people, as designing a microprocessor and fabricating a chip is.

Source code is meaningless gibberish to most users, regardless of whether that source code describes hardware or software. Code written in VHDL is just a slightly more arcane strain of gibberish than C, but still meaningless.

Most people (who have even the foggiest idea of open source) benefit from it indirectly: by having higher-quality products to begin with, and having them available from more vendors, and having a guarantee that if a vendor tanks, that their product stands a better chance of being supported by somebody else (because another company or organization can take it over). This would also be true with hardware. An open and well-documented chip design would be available, were it popular, from a variety of vendors, and even if one vendor went out of business, the design would survive. These benefits exist even to people who cannot understand code, and exist for both hardware and software.