Dear OpenBIOS project members and other interested parties,
There has been a lot of rumours and discussion about the "availability" of sources for Award BIOS and other commercial firmwares on this mailing list recently. These sources were apparently available from their authors accidently. Due to the copyright and patent infringement implied by such actions as well as the fact that reusing faulty commercial concepts for an open-source firmware implementation is simply a bad idea I have to set down the following ground rules in order to achieve a clean implementation of our project goals and avoid possible future prosecution:
1) The goal of this project is to develop a free, open source, architecture independant firmware implementation following, when possible, the IEEE Standard for Boot (Initialization Configuration) Firmware (IEEE 1275-1994). Including not only the implementation of the standard itself but also the required toolkit consisting of a C to FCode compiler, an FCode tokenizer and an FCode detokenizer. This toolkit will simplify driver and API development implementing ANSI C as the development language instead of Forth/FCode as suggested by the IEEE standard.
2) We cannot allow _any_ discussion or use of _any_ copyrighted, patented, or otherwise protected Firmware or BIOS implementations in this project or on the mailing list associated with this project. All members of this project and/or the according mailing lists agree to not disclose or use any copyrighted, patented, or otherwise protected information, ideas or concepts.
3) We do not intend to implement any of the ideas or concepts expressed in the current Intel 32bit architechture, except when these are necessary to insure the compatability with existing hardware. Such ideas and concepts will only be used if such use is not restricted by _any_ laws, copyrights or patents.
4) In order to assure truly universal implementation and/or optimize the functionality and performance it is our expressed wish to work in conjunction with other open source firmware projects.
5) Cooperation with hardware vendors is necessary to implement this project on an architecture-independent basis. In certain cases this may include signing non-disclosure agreements with the aforementioned hardware vendors in an attempt to acquire hardware specific information or support that may not otherwise be available although the results of such cooperation must be freely redistributable.
6) Cooperation with any university, research project, or organization is desired except in such cases where the resulting information is restricted in use or redistributability.
7) Although we agree with the ideas promoted by the free software foundation we do not and/or cannot necessarily agree with all of the rules set by the foundation. In this light it could, to some extent, be a contrast of wishes to become an offical GNU project.
If, for whatever reasons, any of the above statements are unacceptable or seem to be inccorect or unclear in _any_ way please do not hesitate to discuss this matter on the mailing list, I am open for suggestions. This is simply an attempt to assure the legal stauts of this project, protecting those involved from legal prosecution as well as to state the general goals of the project.
Best regards, Stefan Reinauer stepan@core-systems.de OpenBIOS project founder.