Code of Conduct

Dear OpenBIOS project members and other interested parties,

For the ease of development and for information on what can be expected from this project we want to set down the following ground rules in order to achieve a high quality implementation of our project objectives.

1. The objective of this project is to develop a free, open source, architecture independant firmware implementation following, if possible, the IEEE Standard for Boot (Initialization Configuration) Firmware (IEEE 1275-1994). Including not only the implementation of the standard itself but also the required toolkit consisting of a C to FCode compiler, an FCode tokenizer and an FCode detokenizer. This toolkit will simplify driver and API development implementing ANSI C as the development language instead of implementing Forth/FCode directly as suggested by the IEEE standard.

2. We cannot allow _any_ discussion or use of _any_ copyrighted, patented, or otherwise protected Firmware or BIOS implementations without an OSI approved license in this project or on the mailing list associated with this project. All members of this project and/or the according mailing lists agree to not disclose or use any copyrighted, patented, or otherwise protected information, ideas or concepts.

3. We do not intend to implement any of the ideas or concepts expressed in the current Intel 32bit architechture, except when these are necessary to insure the compatability with existing hardware. Such ideas and concepts will only be used if such use is not restricted by _any_ laws, copyrights or patents.

4. In order to assure truly universal implementation and/or optimize the functionality and performance it is our expressed wish to work in conjunction with other open source (firmware) projects, such as coreboot or U-Boot.

5. Cooperation with hardware vendors is necessary to implement this project on an architecture-independent basis. In certain cases this may include signing non-disclosure agreements with the aforementioned hardware vendors in an attempt to acquire hardware specific information or support that may not otherwise be available although the results of such cooperation must be freely redistributable.

6. Cooperation with any university, research project, or organization is desired except in such cases where the resulting information is restricted in use or redistributability.

If, for whatever reasons, any of the above statements are unacceptable or seem to be incorrect or unclear in _any_ way please do not hesitate to discuss this matter on the mailing list, we are open for suggestions. This is simply an attempt to assure the legal status of this project, protecting those involved from legal prosecution as well as to state the general objectives of the project.

OpenBIOS development team.