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[Freedombox-discuss] Intel Compute Stick



+++ Blibbet [2015-01-13 19:20 -0800]:
> However, I'm concerned that while UEFI might be licensed in an
> OSI-compliant license, there are other restrictions from UEFI Forum
> members regarding using it. I don't have any info on this, except
> secondhand info who claim it would cost $$ to do nonstandard things to
> UEFI, like build it w/o ACPI support or SMM support or with a CoreBoot
> PI init package, etc. 

I don't believe this is true (but am no UEFI expert, although there is
one in my office :-). The main thing that makes UEFI code problematic
at the moment is the FAT driver, which is specifically BSD licenced
but with an additional restriction that it can only be used for UEFI
(in order to benefit from a FAT patent exemption). That bit isn't
free, (because restriction by domain is not allowed by DFSG/OSI) and
thus is shipped in the non-free bits of the archive by Fedora and
Debian. The distros are looking into ways to fix this (by relicencing,
or re-writing), and I understand (from the conversation below) that
redhat/fedora people are actively working on it.

http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/cross-distro/2014-December/000767.html
http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/cross-distro/2014-December/000767.html

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/



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