On Nov 8, 2005, at 11:46 PM, tristan wrote:
Another question: VIA has published a "FastBoot" BIOS that seems to be a fork of LinuxBIOS, since it's a fork and LinuxBIOS is covered by GPL, is FastBoot a GPL violation? Someone has ever had the sources of FastBoot?
There was some discussion of this on the VIA-Arena forum but I don't know that any certain evidence was produced. It seems very unlikely that VIA wrote FastBoot from scratch so the general consensus was that they are likely violating the GPL from LinuxBios. But getting any sort of interaction from VIA on such is also likely going to be difficult as they pretty much do not offer support for anyone other than large customers. I seem to recall that FastBoot is also setup to boot Windows only, though I'm not sure what this means, if true, from a technical point of view (support only booting from a FAT file system or some such?). -jrg