Supporting extension ROMs and beyond...

[ron minnich]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Steve Gehlbach wrote:

> The point was, is it a proprietary BIOS from a mfr of the 
> video/motherboard?  I got the impression we were talking of copying a 
> binary into the project, and wanted to know if it was a copyrighted and 
> proprietary work.  Or did I miss the point?  

you missed the point. We will never copy a vga bios into the tree in any 
place unless given permission. 

> The issue is that just 
> because you bought the board doesn't mean you have the right to copy the 
> BIOS code, unless the mfr is specifically giving us the license to do that.

Fair use says, I think, that you can copy a bios from your machine to your
machine for personal use. Certainly that's what you do when you load a new
bios image from a web site. You can't distribute it. So ADLO supports
getting the VGA bios out of your on-card bios and building it into
linuxbios. That's how it is done: copy it from your machine to your 
machine. 

VGABIOS, on the other hand, just finds the on-card bios and runs it.

ron