On May 27, 2005, at 11:58 AM, vinai wrote:
I also heard/read somewhere a while back that there were licensing
issues with miBoot, which prevented it being included with Debian. I
was just wondering what the source of those issues were, and if they
were any closer to being resolved ... ?
the problem with miboot is that it uses a small binary blob which
contains the instructions for calling the Mac ROM to load the next
phase of the boot process. That blob is the same as the binary blob
that Apple uses for the same purpose in loading MacOS (pre MacOS-X)
and Apple owns that blob. I'm not clear which of the various types of
intellectual property (copyright, patent, trade-secret, etc...) is
involved here.
There are a number of things that could be done about this:
1) Some group of folks could get together and do a "clean-room"
re-implementation of that blob.
2) Somebody with some negotiating skills could try to get Apple to
release that blob under a GPL compatible license.
3) Ignore the problem. Apple is unlikely to sue anybody over this --
it's not relevant to their current product line. It can't affect
their current or future bottom-line, so there's no reason for them to
care enough to do anything about it.
4) Do not distribute miboot as part of any (future) Debian release,
but allow people to discuss it on the lists hypothetically. As in: "If
you had a copy of miboot -- which you can get from here -- you could
do the following, and it might work. But if you did that, you
wouldn't really have a free system, would you?")
There's been talk of doing (1) but no serious volunteers have stepped
forward yet.
The problem with (2) would be getting anybody at Apple to care enough
to listen to you. After that it would depend on the current
"intellectual property" climate in that particular corner of
Apple-land. They might might say "OK" and just do it. But they might
conceivably say "Thank you for pointing this out to me. I didn't know
this sort of thing was going on!" and start suing everybody in sight
for misappropriation of Apple's proprietary code. And you don't know
which outcome to expect until you try.
If you want to make an OldWorld bootable CD, you need more than just
miboot. As has been discussed here recently, and in this list in the
past, you also need the CD driver files. By itself, miboot will work
with floppies, because the floppy driver is in the Apple ROM.
Unfortunately, but understandably, that's not true of the CD driver.
Rick