On 05/31/13 16:38, Anthony Liguori wrote:
It's either Open Source or it's not. It's currently not.
I disagree with this binary representation of Open Source or Not. If it weren't (mostly) Open Source, how could we fork (most of) it as you're suggesting (from the soapbox :))?
I have a hard time sympathesizing with trying to work with a proprietary upstream.
My experience has been positive.
First of all, whether UEFI is a good thing or not is controversial. I won't try to address that.
However UEFI is here to stay, machines are being shipped with it, Linux and other OSen try to support it. Developing (or running) an OS in combination with a specific firmware is sometimes easier / more economic in a virtual environment, hence there should be support for qemu + UEFI. It is this mindset that I operate in. (Oh, I also forgot to mention that this task has been assigned to me by my superiors as well :))
Jordan, the OvmfPkg maintainer is responsive and progressive in the true FLOSS manner (*), which was a nice surprise for a project whose coding standards for example are made 100% after Windows source code, and whose mailing list is mostly subscribed to by proprietary vendors. Really when it comes to OvmfPkg patches the process follows the "normal" FLOSS development model.
(*) Jordan, I hope this will prompt you to merge VirtioNetDxe v4 real soon now :)
I personally think the 2-clause BSDL for 99% of the project was a very sane and practical one from Intel et al.
FatPkg is a sad exception. One might even consider it a bad accident: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.tianocore.devel/1861/focus=1878
I have no idea how that selection process went down, but I assume if FLOSS people had been screaming very loud at that time and had offered a *simple* (which ext2 is not, I gather), wide-spread and unencumbered filesystem, things would be different today.
In terms of creating a FAT module, the most likely source would seem to be the kernel code and since that's GPL, I don't think it's terribly avoidable to end up with a GPL'd uefi implementation.
If that's inevitable, then we're wasting effort by rewriting stuff under a BSD license.
Please ask your employer if they'd be willing to put their name on an original, clean-room, GPL-licensed implementation of FAT32 for UEFI.
Thus far we've been talking copyright rather than patents, but there's also this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_filesystem#Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_filesystem#Patent_infringement_lawsuits
It almost doesn't matter who prevails in such a lawsuit; the *possibility* of such a lawsuit gives people cold feet. Blame the USPTO.
Laszlo