>> might be done. I wonder, is it legal to reverse engineer your BIOS and
>> then make a competing BIOS? Did we ever sign a license agreement, when
>> we bought our computers, about the BIOS? I didn't. Did any of you?
>> There's a program called Sourcer that I'm trying to save up for that
>> reverse engineers your BIOS and gives you source code. It does the same
>> thing for Windows, but as they note, there is no practical value in
>> reassembling the source (you can't sell it under your name).
>
>
> Isn't this exactly what Compaq did back in the day in order to make
> their first PC compatible? Not sure how the legal landscape has changed
> since then, but I'm pretty sure it was legal at one time.
Well, as I recall, IBM came out with the original PC and immediately five or
six small operations made their own BIOSes. IBM then sued all and sundry for
IP violation, except one of them had anticipated this move and did the
following:
The hired a team of engineers to disassemble and analyse the BIOS. This team
then wrote detailed technical specs. on the IBM BIOS, detailing what the
entry points were and what effect they had, but NO DETAILS WHATSOEVER on how
they did it. The company hired a second team of engineers who had no contact
of any kind with the first team (and provably so), which then wrote a BIOS
from the specs. This BIOS worked and was sold to the budding clone makers
and the company DOCUMENTED EVERY STEP. The whole procedure was so
bullet-proof in the eyes of IBM corporate lawyers that IBM didn't take any
legal action against this company. The company was called Pheonix BIOS if I
recall correctly. So to be safe, you have to follow the same path as a
minimum. Implementing an independant BIOS is OK, but using any code from
another is a definite legal no-no, no matter how that code is derived.
