Name of Presentation: LinuxBIOS
Description: LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers. Quite an interesting project since the boot firmware is considered by many as the final frontier to a fully open source software PC.
Contact: peter@stuge.se
Interview
For a little background, can you describe the general topic of your presentation and tell us what is new in the last few months?
I will be discussing LinuxBIOS, which is an open source project that develops boot firmware for PCs, so that the proprietary (with all the worst side effects) BIOS can be replaced with software that comes with source and freedom.
New in the last few months is version 3 of LB, which is a complete rewrite and restructuring of the code. We started designing it about a year ago at the LinuxBIOS summit in Hamburg and earlier this year we got v3 up and running in qemu, but during the last months there's also been work done to get v3 running on the first hardware, which is an important step in order to verify that the design will actually work the way we have planned it.
Can you give a summary of what you will present?
Since it's a lightning talk, the talk itself will be a summary, visiting the project's past, present and future and hopefully sparking some new cool ideas in the audience along the way.
Why should someone choose to come to your presentation?
* they've already heard about the project and want to know more
* they want to help replace the "technologically challengend" relic from the 1980s that is the BIOS, and want to find out how.
* they are concerned with how the next-gen closed boot firmware EFI can communicate with the network, will run beneath the OS, without being visible to or controllable by the user, and want something re-assuring so they can sleep at night
* they want to boot their Linux system in just a few seconds
* they want to laugh at me when the demo fails like it did at C3 :)
How did you get involved in Free Software and in what way is it important to you?
A die hard control freak coder I made funny TSRs in the DOS days, and even explored the operating system field a bit. The open source way was a great contrast to the secrecy surrounding DOS and Windows, which effectively made it difficult-to-impossible for anyone but megacorps to do good software development.
I consider this the single most important thing about open source, or free software; empowering people to do with their machines what they want and for those who are technically inclined that means to be able to learn from others before them.
I think open source (both software and hardware) plays a big part in the kind of demands we consumers will be placing on technology in the future too, as the life cycle of closed products gets shorter and the quality lower, the life cycle of open products never really ends as long as there is interest in it, thus pushing quality toward infinity.
There's still not that critical mass in the market screaming for openness, but we're definately getting closer and once we reach it, everyone will wonder how we could pay for laptops with a meek few hours of battery life in the 21st century, just like we today wonder how we managed to get through life before we had cellphones.
We don't need better battery technology, we need to focus on how software and hardware can come together to attain higher efficiency. The XO laptop (former OLPC) will surely be an eye-opener for the world, not just the kids who get to use one.
Is there any other particular presentation you'll be going to? Why is that topic of interest?
I want to check out the political discussions about rights and licensing on day 1 because that's also an important part of freedom, and I already know most of the technologies being discussed day 1 fairly well.
Day 2 I'm going for the female touch because it's an interesting topic, MySQL clustering because I am an advanced MySQL user and OpenMoko because I love (open) hardware. Last but certainly not least there are the lightning talks because they may have unexpected golden nuggets.
