On 20.03.2014 13:45, Peter Stuge wrote:
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
On 20.03.2014 11:25, Allen Yan wrote:
Hi, David, When at AsusTek Suzhou, my work is mainly responsible for bios porting and fixing bug.
Do I understand it correctly, that you've had access to proprietary BIOS code? If so which papers did you sign and under what license did you get them?
Vladimir, I would assume that Jinyi signed a standard employment agreement. Employment agreements contain a non-disclure clause which covers all non-public information which the employer has received from suppliers and customers.
Depending on the answers it may partially or fully disqualify you from contributing to coreboot.
I disagree, and I think your tone is rude.
I didn't mean to be rude. I apologise if it sounded like this. I'm somewhat pessimistic generally and a mathematician and so I look for problems first.
Please be supportive of GSoC candidates who are showing an interest in coreboot, especially candidates such as Jinyi who can obviously contribute with significant relevant experience from the firmware domain.
I didn't mean to be dismissive, when I discuss problems it's to prevent and fix them.
Employment agreements have clauses about not working on competing products. coreboot in summer of 2014 does not compete with BIOS for commercial mainboards in 2008. I am obviously not a lawyer but I can not see a problem here.
They sometimes also have draconian non-disclosure parts. We can't know until such issues are checked by someone qualified. I'm not. Does coreboot has some kind of experts it can use for those cases? On GNU projects I'd refer to copyright clerk who would in turn refer further if needed.
//Peter