On Thursday 01 May 2008, Richard M Stallman wrote:
Some of the points are simply distractions or illogical. For instance:
BIOS is a part of the reliability and performance promise of the hardware.Is that true? If so, so what? That is no reason not to let us run our own BIOS.
Well, sort of. From my experience, which very likely most on this list can share, BIOS is used to cover up defects in the hardware. Thus, it's a PR question, not a technical one.
Chipset specifications at the level being discussed are commonly considered proprietary by all silicon vendors, not just Intel.
As Peter has already mentioned, that's a lie^W^Woutdated. Additionally to Peter's points, the new "gallium" driver for mesa is being developed for a pure software pipeline and, as the only hardware implementation,... TADAAA: intel onboard graphics i915.
However, it is false: some computer models do work with free BIOS. Intel compares badly with them. This is one of the statements that maybe could be criticized in a published response.
The open source firmware work that Intel *is* sponsoring could lead to a solution where proprietary low-level chipset initialization code from silicon vendors is made compatible with open source higher-level platform initialization and pre-boot management.As they say, this is not a complete free BIOS, just part of one.
As things look like today, it's a layer _on_top_ of what's currently known as BIOS. Besides, did they lift the royalties clause on UEFI yet? (http://www.uefi.org/specs/agreement : "...implementation ... requires a license")
Torsten