Talk:UEFI

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A comment [[User:Larry|Larry]] 13:52, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
: A reply [[User:Sally|Sally]] 10:43, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
:: Your reply ~~~~

Copyright on UEFI?

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This discussion is still ongoing.

As I understand it, UEFI is an open standard. The documents are freely available, as is the reference implementation. What would be the copyright issue on the history of UEFI?

I think that knowing a little bit of the history is important in that sense as to understand why things are included and why architectures are as they are. But that's just my humble opinion.

So, what's the (copyright) status of (the history of) UEFI?

Luttztfz (talk) 14:48, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

See page xli on https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_10_Aug29.pdf and page ii of https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Shell_2_2.pdf. Both are "All rights reserved" with little to no provisions. As for history, this is a technical wiki for Gentoo Linux not some general encyclopedia. I feel that is someone else's job so point them there. --Grknight (talk) 14:57, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Now that's interesting. The per-architecture fallback bootloader, which basically is the removable media bootloader, is of interest to early x86 UEFIs as some computers with a buggy implementation rely on this to boot. Debian GNU/Linux introduced the fallback option due to this fact.^ref I myself own a strange ~2010 minitower PC that has exactly that issue: with it, only one EFI bootloader would ever work. Windows installs its own EFI bootloader there as well, and Linux should have that in the wiki as well. (BTW, rodsbooks.com by Rod Smith has great webpages on UEFI but it is also copyrighted, so not usable as well? E.g. Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux: Basic Principles)

But it is exactly that information that I pulled from the copyrighted specification. The history on the other hand is free; if it's in the specs as well then no more than it can be found there additionally to news tickers and other sources.

So, the interesting part is gone and the free part with it.

I do get the notion that the UEFI history might be too much for the Gentoo Wiki though.

Luttztfz (talk) 15:23, 2 February 2023 (UTC)