Bug#323182: a bit more about miboot's legal status

[Jeremie Koenig <sprite@sprite.fr.eu.org>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 07:55:42AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> >   - miboot itself uses free-as-in-beer libraries from Apple, which are
> >     shipped together with the source code, so we would have to ask
> >     miboot's author to add an exception for them to its licensing terms,
> >     which he hadn't done yet, though comments in the source distribution
> >     seemed to indicate he's aware of the problem.
> 
> This doesn't make miboot free, and is not really an issue, since the boot
> sector is not linked, i belive, but only agregated into the same media. Same
> as your bios is not linked to lilo.

I understand this, but was speaking about a different problem. IIRC
miBoot itself uses a non-free library from Apple, in addition to being
loaded by a non-free bootloader.

> mkvmlinuz is different, it uses the already existing zImage.coff format, which
> was in use before quik, yaboot or bootx where around.

My understanding was that oldworld OpenFirmware were broken wrt loading
such images (I can't remember where I got this impresstion, though.)

Is there a way to load such an image from an old OpenFirmware?

Also, does anyone expect quik to be loadable from a floppy? (ie would
that work with those old broken OF's?)

At the time I looked into the quik side, it seemed the only thing it
missed was the ability to deduce the floppy device name from its
configuration in order to be installable on a floppy, but I don't know
wether this omission was deliberate or not.

-- 
Jeremie Koenig <sprite@sprite.fr.eu.org>