Back soon.

[Stefan Reinauer]

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Hi Openbios hackers,

I am sorry for my long time of silence. I had to finnish a lot of work of which
I thought it could be done much faster. I expect to be able to spend quite much
time for OpenBIOS starting from next week.

I got a complete intel testing machine plus 2 motherboards for testing with
OpenBIOS (one is an old SMP board). I got my old vt100 Terminal running now, too

Niklas Ekström wrote a little Program which is able so put a disk file into the
shadowed ram from 0xe0000-0xfffff. This allows to test a bios without needing
to flash it. I had no time to test it yet. Thanks, Niklas. I'll put it on the
web page as soon as I finnished the last stuff here.

I'll finally try to move the OpenBIOS homepage and mailing list to openbios.org

We had some problems with our mail server here which caused a lot of "Too many
hops" mails to be sent out and deliver some mails more than one time. I suspect
it was some software update on our universities mail gateway, so I don't think
it will happen again soon.


Last week I got mail from Richard Stallman asking whether we want to become an
official GNU project. We should discuss whether to do so or not. Here's an
excerpt from what he wrote:

- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's an explanation of what it means for a program
to be GNU software.  I would be very glad to have OpenBIOS as
a GNU Program, if that's what the developers of OpenBIOS would like.

======================================================================
Calling a program GNU software means that its developers and the GNU
project agree that "This program is part of the GNU project, released
under the aegis of GNU"--and say so in the program.

This means we would normally put the program on ftp.gnu.org (although
we could instead refer to the developer's choice of ftp site) and we
would want to put pages about the program on the GNU web server.

It means that the developers would agree pay some attention to making
the program work well with the rest of the GNU system--and conversely
that the GNU project would encourage other GNU maintainers to pay some
attention to making their programs fit in well with it.

Just what it means to make programs work well together is mainly a
practical matter that depends on what the program does.  But there are
a few general principles.  Certain parts of the GNU coding standards
directly affect the consistency of the whole system.  These include
the standards for configuring and building a program, and the
standards for command-line options.  It is important to make all GNU
programs follow these standards, where they are applicable.

A GNU program should not recommend use of any non-free program, and it
should not refer the user to any non-free documentation.  The need for
free documentation is now a major focus of the GNU project; to show
that we are serious about the need for free documentation, we must not
contradict our position by recommending use of documentation that
isn't free.

Occasionally there are issues of terminology which are important for
the success of the GNU project as a whole.  So we ask maintainers of
GNU programs to follow them.  For example, the documentation files
and comments in the program should speak of Linux-based GNU systems or
GNU/Linux systems, rather than calling the whole system "Linux", and
should use the term "free software" rather than "open source".

Deciding that a program is GNU software does not necessarily require
transferring copyright to the FSF; that is a separate issue.
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Especially the documentation passage may be a problem for us. But anyways, I'd
like the idea of having openbios an official gnu project - what do you think?


Best regards,
   Stefan

- -- 
Reincarnation: Life sucks, then you die. Then life sucks again.

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