OpenBIOS news.

[Stefan Reinauer]

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.