I had lost this mailing list for a few months this summer and when I finally do find it I find that there is something tangible to play with. Most excellent. :-)
Daniel Engstroem told, that he would prefer "Generic Firmware" as name for this project. This is sure a philosophical question, but I'd like to see the word "Open" in our project name. As OpenFirmware is already taken by the IEEE standard, I decided to use OpenBIOS. On the other hand, what we want to do is not to write just another BIOS like MR BIOS, Award BIOS, Ami BIOS, Phoenix BIOS, ... but something completely new with the approach of being modern.
Personally I love the name OpenBIOS. It kind of goes well with the F-CPU. Just because it has the acronym "BIOS" in it doesn't mean it can't be something better than anything else with the same acronym.
- I thought about writing email to some chipset manufacturers to ask whether they want to participate in our project by writing free code for their hardware. Does anyone have an idea what to write?
I would guess that the best method to target the chipset manufacturers would be to indicate that by releasing the specifcations to their chipsets they are making it available to MANY more people than they would via an NDA or similarly closed agreement policy. Look at Apple/IBM... As far as having the chipset manufacturers write code... I doubt they'd be interested... that is what the databooks are for, for someone *else* to use *their* hardware. :-)
As far as licensing goes, I agree that it should be licensed such that it remains free and in the public domain no matter what gets done with it. I too am lacking in the license knowledge department, however.
Andrew