On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 04:33:34PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote: > Sven Luther wrote: > > If i came up with the following : > > > > 1) A description in text form of what the individual bits of this 1K > > boot sector does, and what is needed for miboot booting. > > 2) a small C program or shell script which generate said 1K boot > > sector from some kind of more formal version of the above description. > > > > Would it then be considered as free and could go in main ? > > No, it would be a derived work of this non-free code, unless you did a > clean-room reimplementation. Having 1 person do 1) and someone else do > 2) based only on 1) is prettly close to properly doing such a > reimplementation though.
As said, i did not see the code in question, so if i get someone else doing 1) (Jeremie Koenig or Benjamin Herrenschmidt), i can then do 2). Still, i think this is really approaching the point of excessive silliness don't you think ? Do you really have a feel of the expense of energy involved for 3-7 or so rom system calls in a fixed format boot sector ? Come on, it would be like saying that the keypresses needed to change the bios parameters would need a clean room reimplementation. Friendly, Sven Luther
