MorphOS for AmigaONE

[HyperionMP]

Jeezus Nate, you are particularly ill-informed for somebody working at Genesi.

U-Boot is a GPL'ed open-source project, not a proprietary product at all.

If anything is proprietary, it's Openfirmware.

[HyperionMP]

I should also add that we NEVER received an offer from Genesi to obtain the full documentation of the Pegasos hardware including chipsets and firmware documentation.

Idiotic offers to come and pick up the hardware in Paris aside, this is exactly what is needed to even contemplate a port of OS 4 to the Pegasos I.

No hardware modifications are required incidentally, just access to the firmware.

Having said that, given the fact that there are at best only 600 Pegasos I machines out there and far fewer actually sold, it's hardly worth the effort.

The Pegasos I is a discontinued product which has no future and a permanently fixed userbase.

[HyperionMP]

The main point here is that the AmigaOne userbase is not "closed". It can expand beyond whatever number is has now.

Not so for the Pegasos I.

The Pegasos II (if and when it is released) is a different proposition ofcourse.

But I won't be commenting on that until such time as the hardware is actually commercially released.

[HyperionMP]

Sorry Nate but first you are going on about U-Boot being proprietary.

This was clearly wrong as the definition of the word "proprietary" means that it is a specific entity's property.

GPL'ed software by definition cannot be proprietary as the GPL license puts the code in the public domain.

So you suddenly reverse course and claim that it's the actual Mai hardware that is proprietary.

This is again wrong unless the design were protected by some kind of intellectual or industrial property right which it clearly is not.

Anybody can copy the Mai motherboard.

You would ofcourse need proprietary chipsets like the Articia S and the VIA unless you choose to develop your own replacements.

Bottom-line is: the Pegasos design is no more proprietary or less proprietary than the Mai motherboard.

The fact that it adheres or not to a "standard" like POP etc. doesn't change that one bit.

Unless you are suggesting you can build a POP board without using proprietary CPU's and chipsets.

[HyperionMP]

You are still very much wrong Nate.

It is clear that GPL'ed software like U-Boot is not capable of being owned by anybody on the basis of the GPL license alone.

I'm sure you are not denying it.

Can one builld proprietary hardware using GPl'ed software?

Sure. But that would imply that the proprietary nature of the hardware design and of the design alone (e.g. protected by a patent) would give rise to its proprietary nature.

This is not the case for the Mai motherboards.

Neither the hardware nor the firmware is proprietary in this case.

With respect to Open Firmware:

First of all, the IEEE standard was withdrawn. It is in fact no longer an IEEE standard.

Take a look at:

http://www.openfirmware.org/

"The IEEE-1275 Open Firmware standard was not reaffirmed by the OFWG and has been officially withdrawn by IEEE. Unfortunately, this means it is unavailable from the IEEE. "

Has this any impact on its proprietary nature?

No.

A "standard" and/or its implementation can be completely proprietary.

Companies developing firmware on the basis of the Openfirmware "standard" are developing proprietary software because that specific implementation is protected by copyright.

I am not allowed to strip out a Mac's firmware or the Pegasos's OF rom and distribute it because that is a violation of copyright law.

Hence, while something might well be an "open" standard (ie in the public domain), the actual implementation of that open standard is nearly always proprietary i.e. protected by copyright law.

Not so for U-Boot which is GPL'ed.

[HyperionMP]

We don't need a "free" Pegasos, we are capable of obtaining one ourselves.

In fact, no less than 3 OS 4 developers have a Pegasos.

What we would really need is full disclosure of the hardware documentation (all chipsets) and of the firmware including the ability to reflash the rom.

There was NEVER an offer on the table for that.

The hardware by itself is useless.

[HyperionMP]

Not if that were finished, it would indeed be a non-proprietary implementation of Openfirmware.

And we have been aware of that project for some time.

Don't forget that the original Teron boards used a proprietary OF Rom developed by Softex.

Mai didn't feel like continuing with more proprietary firmware so they chose PPCBoot instead which they could freely adapt and copy themselves.

So we did look into that open source project at the time but its state was very much unsuitable for our purpose.

U-Boot is in fact used by tons of embedded system hardware using a variety of different CPU's like PPC and StrongArm/X-Scale.

Why?

Because if they went for OF instead, they would have to hire a company to adapt its proprietary OF implementation to a specific piece of hardware.

No such problems with U-Boot.

You can either adapt it to your own hardware or hire somebody else to do it.

Either way, you'll get full disclosure of the source-code and are free to copy and adapt it.

[HyperionMP]

Matt, I'm not going to debate the definition of "proprietary" to death here but the point is that "proprietary" refers to something being somebody's property, being "owned" by someone.

In the context of intangible assets, proprietary refers to the existence of intellectual and industrial property rights governing these assets.

In that sense an implementation of OF by a specific company is proprietary because they hold the copyright on this implementation.

This is impossible with the GPL license.

With respect to U-Boot versus OF, U-boot is very widely used as well by numerous vendors.

Moreover, the U-Boot shipping with the current AmigaOne hardware is by far more feature-rich that the Pegasos' OF (to the extent that anybody cares).

[HyperionMP]

Just a few examples: U-Boot nows has tons of configuration menues which allows you to tweak all kinds of Articia S settings (PCI/AGP), the location of parallel and serial ports & modes, selection of booting devices, integrated diagnostic code, support for Port 80/Post type cards, support for the Catweasel controller etc. etc.

[HyperionMP]

I really don't understand that.

I mean, it is not like you accidentally end up in the firmware configuration menues, you need to take action to do so.

If you have no business there and that should hold for most users most of the time, you'll never even notice that these menues are there.