Michael Poole a écrit :
Or maybe he didn't understand what you were talking about because you were using jargon peculiarly. Most people use "boot loader" to refer to the stub loaded from disk that starts in real mode and loads the kernel. Most people use "BIOS" to refer to software that, in part, loads and starts that stub. You used "boot loader" to refer to the latter.
Right. I use bootloader to refer to the software run by the BIOS which loads and starts the kernel. I try to follow the discussion, since i'm involve with the speedtouch driver (and Marco d'Itri is the debian maintainer of this package). I find most post quite boring, but i'm interested in various issues. I do agree that firmwares (in my case) is a software run inside the modem (ARM processor). But i might add another point of view.
When I started writing the speedtouch driver, I first try to understand what "data" was needed to send to the modem. 0 and 1's. Next, i make a C program that would send such data under GNU/Linux. After few tries, it somehow works. And since I have a repeated patterns of data, I decided to put them in a file. Since I had written all that and choose the GPL license, I thought that the data were GPL'ed too. And put everything on my web pages. From that, how do i know that my "data" was a firmware? and that it was copyrighted? And that it was licensed? And that license was not authorizing distribution.
I discovered it. And the manufacturer tell me too. And since my file was containing a clear copyright statement, I immediately stop distributing it and remove any reference to it.
All this story is to say that it's not easy to say that such piece of data is a firwware. And to say if such piece of data is under some copyright or license.
Now, i'm curious to know what will be the definitive conclusion of this thread. And what our users should have to do to use their hardware. I hope they could still use their debian system like me.
Benoit PAPILLAULT