Dear OpenBIOS readers,
at first I have to tell you that I am totally overwhelmed by the subscriptions in the last three days. Our project has been announced on http://slashdot.org/ and will be announced on http://news.freshmeat.net/ this evening or tomorrow.
Well, I saw some wishes on the wishlist, that I think are necessary to discuss here.
1) Licence Is anything speaking against using GPL as licence for OpenBIOS? I am not really into that licencing stuff. Would it be better to use some kind of BSD licence or even the Netscape NPL? I want to make sure that this project will remain free forever and people can use it for free, no matter whether it is commercial use or not. And, of course, I think it would be best, if changes made by foreign contributors are included into the official project.
2) Name 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.
3) Supported hardware Many people told me that they would like to see support for recent PCI hardware only. I think this makes sense, because it's easy to autoprobe chipset type and SuperIO type on the PCI bus. This allows us to have one generic firmware image that can be flashed to a couple of different machines that have different motherboards. This is especially nice for people with large computer pools (like admins of universitiy pools)
Please note: I don't want to keep anyone from writing support for his very own hardware, but the main goal must be to support current stuff. This is IMHO the only way to reach a wide usage of OpenBIOS/GFW
4) There have been many new wishes on the wishlist today, please check them out at http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/wishlist/ and *DO* comment on them.
5) I noticed that the wishlist is still a bit buggy, especially with handling the dates of entries. I hope I get the time to fix that very soon.
6) 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?
So, happy hacking, guys :-)
Stefan.