It's clear that, as a practical matter, Apple doesn't mind if people
distribute the "boot block which is coming directly from Apple and has
a couple tens of m68k assembly instructions nobody could be bothered to
reverse-engineer", because other Linux distributions provide it and
Apple has not sued them. So it would seem that the only thing keeping
it out of the Debian/PPC distribution is the Debian Freeness
guidelines. I respect the guidelines, and wouldn't want to go against
them, but it seems a shame that we can't find a practical solution to
this.
Would it be possible to have an otherwise fully functioning boot floppy
image minus the "non-free" part? Then someone, while disclaiming all
connection with Debian except as an interested observer, could put the
"non-free" part on a website somewhere with instructions for combining
the two into a functioning boot floppy?
Rick
PS: Sven makes it sound as if reverse engineering the boot block is a
trivial bit of work. That's not entirely true. It's only trivial if
you happen to have the necessary coding and de-coding skills and the
necessary background in calling Apple's OF boot-rom routines. People
with those skills are few and far between. And acquiring them from
scratch for this project is definitely non-trivial. That's why I
didn't volunteer. I don't have the skills and I don't have the time to
acquire them.
Maybe we should establish a bounty for someone to reverse-engineer the
Apple floppy boot block. That might get somebody with the necessary
skills to come out of the woodwork... If ten of us put up US$100,
would that be enough?
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