Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & ..

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 04:33:34PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> > If i came up with the following : 
> > 
> >   1) A description in text form of what the individual bits of this 1K
> >   boot sector does, and what is needed for miboot booting.
> >   2) a small C program or shell script which generate said 1K boot
> >   sector from some kind of more formal version of the above description.
> > 
> > Would it then be considered as free and could go in main ?
> 
> No, it would be a derived work of this non-free code, unless you did a
> clean-room reimplementation. Having 1 person do 1) and someone else do
> 2) based only on 1) is prettly close to properly doing such a
> reimplementation though.

As said, i did not see the code in question, so if i get someone else
doing 1) (Jeremie Koenig or Benjamin Herrenschmidt), i can then do 2).

Still, i think this is really approaching the point of excessive
silliness don't you think ? Do you really have a feel of the expense of
energy involved for 3-7 or so rom system calls in a fixed format boot
sector ? 

Come on, it would be like saying that the keypresses needed to change
the bios parameters would need a clean room reimplementation.

Friendly,

Sven Luther