6 Jan
2017
6 Jan
'17
1:08 a.m.
On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 12:23 PM, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Anyway, the question: with LinuxBIOS, we shipped a
GPL-ed PALcode
implementation. It was pretty dumb, it just did 1:1 virt to phys mapping
for example, but it worked. I've always believed that was the only open
source or at least GPL'ed PALcode out there -- can you tell me if I got
this right?
I have no reason to believe it is otherwise - i.e. I have no knowledge of
anything else. Your comment about PALcode being used as leverage, I never
saw that in practice and I worked with a lot of external folks. I think
it was more of a delta-T between the time DEC engineering released the code
and DEC-Semi got it to the field and the integrators into their systems.
I don't think DEC systems sales tried to compete with the DEC-Semi
customers, although in practice I'm sure they were not very good at being
to have it both ways and certainly made mistakes. Maurice Marks was the
lead techie @ DEC Semi in those days, and a colleague I used to see fairly
often then. I know Maurice would have screamed pretty loud if he saw the
system side of DEC mucking up his business and I think G2-Bob would have
swatted folks if they had - he wanted revenue anyway he could get it. As
I think you know my last DEC projects was the 1K Alpha were we spliced an
EV6 into a $799 AMD based system. The DEC guys were the ones that hated
it (Compaq actually liked it because Dell could not do it). Anyway,
Maurice and I were shaking our heads on that one.
Clem