On 21 Nov, Eivind Eklund wrote:
On Sat, Nov 21, 1998 at 12:04:16AM +0100, daniel.engstrom@riksnett.no wrote:
On 20 Nov, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
- Licence Is anything speaking against using GPL as licence for OpenBIOS?
As the person (or one of the persons) who originally posted that wish, I'll try to explain my position and reasons.
First we should note that changing it from GPL is not an option, these is already some Linux code in there and I expect that there will be more. Look in the source (boot/init32 in the released version, firmware/init in my current tree).
I argue in favour of the NPL (which as far as I can tell work almost like the GPL, with the large exception that it allow the original developer to re-license under another license if this fit his/her goals).
The GPL does not prevent the copyright holder of the code to relicense it under a different license.
Does this relate to OpenBIOS? Quite a bit. Embedded systems developers are probably the people that work most on BIOSes as the field presently is; most embedded systems developers commercially license BIOS source code.
I do embedded systems my self, tech. support, though.
As for my company, we're just running on standard BIOSes at the moment, as we've not had enough pain to warrant the cost of a BIOS source code license. However, if we were to use a custom BIOS, we'd have a hard time choosing whether to pay for a license or use a GPLed sourcebase. This is because a very large cost is the time spent learning the sourcebase, and doing small, non-general modifications to it. This is a part of what gives us competetive edge.
I personally don't want any person or company to use my work to get a 'competative edge' if they keep their changes propetary. They can always find another source-base to abuse.
Examples of changes that could be relevant for our use (but not generally relevant):
- Reading boot code out of a properitary file system layout. Done to avoid people pirating parts of our system for use in competing system.
See above about source abuse.
- Change timing to fit the minimum for parts we actually have, instead of for the specs
Why keep it a secret? It might be useful for somebody else
- Remove probes, replacing them with fixed setups
Typically, there are no probes in a BIOS. Settings are either hard-coded or read form the NVRAM.
- Add cryptographic code and keys to de-crypt further code, to deny the possibility of cracker activity (given that firmware overwrites would be _very_ hard compared to most other cracks). The code might be of general interest; the keys certainly shouldn't be generally available (even with public key cryptography attacks are much less feasible against keys you don't have :-)
Security is ok, but if you feel that you need to keep the source a secret for it to work, you have implemented security through obscurity.
Of course, 'other licensing terms' also include the ability to later change your minds and go with a pure GPL. Just re-license the sourcebase.
As I already have used 3rd party GPL code in this, this discussion is purely theoretical.
/Daniel --