[tenebrisalietum]

The whole PC industry was deeply affected, in a positive manner for consumers, in a negative manner for IBM, by Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's BIOS ROM API. Imagine if users of BIOS/UEFI API had to pay royalties to IBM (which derived it from CP/M).

[hollerith]

>Imagine if users of BIOS/UEFI API had to pay royalties

I always thought that every PC maker did have to pay royalties to Phoenix or one of the other BIOS vendors.

I know that open-source BIOSes, e.g., coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS), exist, but I got the impression that even at this late stage in the BIOS game, only a minority of machines ship with them.

I always thought that Compaq created its clean-room implementation because IBM outright refused to license their BIOS (to Compaq or anyone else).

[pgeorgi]

> I know that open-source BIOSes, e.g., coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS), exist, but I got the impression that even at this late stage in the BIOS game, only a minority of machines ship with them.

coreboot is not an open source BIOS, it's open source firmware. It can be combined with SeaBIOS, which is an actual PCBIOS implementation (that may or may not be in violation of IBM's APIs given this case) to provide a PCBIOS-alike boot environment.

It can also be combined with Tianocore, Intel's open sourced implementation of the high level APIs of UEFI, so that this approach would be less affected by the court case (since that's using code verbatim that was specifically published for that purpose). But who knows if the Oracle case wouldn't affect this approach as well?

coreboot can also be combined with other code for customized boot concepts, like on Chromebooks, which are probably the largest consumer deployment of coreboot, at ~6% of laptops and desktop in the US, apparently (The numbers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... vary wildly depending on the detail each is covering)

> I always thought that Compaq created its clean-room implementation because IBM outright refused to license their BIOS (to Compaq or anyone else).

Apparently Google (or Android before they were bought? not sure) also tried to license Java for Android and that fell through. They didn't clean-room because there was the Harmony stuff to work from that nobody seemed to have a problem with. These days Android's Java is based on OpenJDK which gives it a whole new twist (it being licensed by Oracle under GPL terms).

[jpollock]

Let's rephrase...

Imagine a world where Compaq was unable to create a cleanroom implementation of IBM's BIOS because that involved re-implementing the copyrighted APIs.

[all2]

Where I work we have a line item for every computer we make for a BIOS royalty. So this happens at least sometimes.

[monocasa]

On the copyright of the actual software by Phoenix or Award or whoever, not an API licensing fee.

[simcop2387]

that's the difference though, theyrr free to make one or use any of the existing ones with the conditions of the authors. they're not forbidden to make their own or use a competitor's like the oracle ruling could otherwise mean.

[kiba]

I am told that this is a deliberate choice by IBM.

[flomo]

Antitrust decree. IBM also did come back and collect royalties from the PC industry.