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