Supporting extension ROMs and beyond...
ron minnich
rminnich at lanl.gov
Mon Aug 11 19:06:00 CEST 2003
On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Steve Gehlbach wrote:
> The point was, is it a proprietary BIOS from a mfr of the
> video/motherboard? I got the impression we were talking of copying a
> binary into the project, and wanted to know if it was a copyrighted and
> proprietary work. Or did I miss the point?
you missed the point. We will never copy a vga bios into the tree in any
place unless given permission.
> The issue is that just
> because you bought the board doesn't mean you have the right to copy the
> BIOS code, unless the mfr is specifically giving us the license to do that.
Fair use says, I think, that you can copy a bios from your machine to your
machine for personal use. Certainly that's what you do when you load a new
bios image from a web site. You can't distribute it. So ADLO supports
getting the VGA bios out of your on-card bios and building it into
linuxbios. That's how it is done: copy it from your machine to your
machine.
VGABIOS, on the other hand, just finds the on-card bios and runs it.
ron
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