[OpenBIOS] award bios source code - please send requests

Stefan Reinauer stepan at core-systems.de
Mon Aug 27 23:39:57 CEST 2001


* Gavin Robert Brewer <gavinbr at gavinbr.worldonline.co.uk> [010827 19:44]:
> What is it with you folks? Always so shit-scared of Micro$oft? 

This is not about being scared of anything. This project is about creating
a new idea, not crap based on stolen crappy ideas from the past.

> Let me tell you something about Apple, Micro$oft, Sun and all the other
> merry pirates of Silicon Valley. They STOLE all their code. 

But we are the Open Source movement. We won't steal code and we have enough
free knowledge and hardware manufacturer support. If we want to see or use 
Award or what-ever code, we buy and use Award BIOS. Since this is not our
goal, we're not going to look at this code nor take any line of it.
End of discussion.

> Billy G. was the worst hypocrite of all. He wrote angry letters to
> Homebrew, and yet he ripped of IBM to get x86DOS, and basically rename
> is MS-DOS. The guy is a fraud.

IBM was just plain stupid, imho. They sold a PC product based on 2/3 outsourced
development with non exclusive contracts. They gave away the CPU market to
Intel and the operating system market to Microsoft. No doubt, during that time
(from Intel's and Microsoft's point of view) it was totally understandable what
they did. In doing so they split Big Blues (IBMs) power into 3 parts
(remember even most of todays democracies are based on splitting state power
 into 3 parts)
No, I am not trying to defend any of these companies. But what happened,
happened. We cannot change the past but we can affect the future.
Based on this principle we're not interested in reusing proprietary ideas 
created by todays monopolists.

> I know the law just like you. And the Law sux on this occasion. 

Law isn't meant to be correct. Laws are made by those who have the power 
to enforce them, not neccessarily those who can make the best decisions. 

> Just dont get caught. Sun and Apple knew that, when they ripped off
> Xerox's work.

But who would be so naive to believe that posting to a publicly available
mailing list that is mirrored by several archives will not get you in trouble. 
I am really sorry, but in which kind of dream world do you live?
BTW, MS products are heavily based on XEROX' ideas but that doesn't justify
using others intellectual property in this project or protect us from a large 
company with the law on their side.

> Award are NOT A CHARITY. They are a profit-making organization. They
> should not exist in my view. BIOS should not exist in my view; it should
> all be done via the OS. 

Unfortunately you don't make the law and it seems that you do not have a clue
about what you are saying. How do you intend to start an OS without being
able to load it first? 
Doesn't a person or a company still have the right to make money with ones 
product or ideas. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Use something that suits
you, make your own, or shut up. There is very little that we can do to stop
them from selling their products except to build something better and I do not
intend to simply use their ideas in a project that theoreticaly could be much 
better and go much further.

> Everyone knows that BIOS calls are inefficient. Award are making money
> out of other's misery. Imagine all the man-hours lost in total, from
> folks waiting for their machines to boot through BIOS...it's homocide!

This is the fact with all this intel based bios crap. This is the reason why
we are not interested in any line of code or idea made by them. Neither from
anyone specifying it legally and telling us (while not working on the project)
nor illegaly. There are better concepts for boot firmware, look at Open
Firmware or LinuxBIOS. The fact that the PC Bios market is polluted by
monopolies does not mean that there are no better solutions to the
existing problem.

> Better that we come up with something better. Apple had the better idea.
> They didnt need sh£%ty BIOS and they knew it. They let the OS handle it
> all. And it WAS better.

Apple uses Open Firmware for quite some time now. So is SUN since many years. 
This is the goal of Open BIOS, too. I suggest anyone following this discussion 
to check out the documentation links on http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS
before participating in any discussion on this mailing list.

	Regards,
	   Stefan Reinauer, Open BIOS project founder.


-- 
Mad, adj.:
        Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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