[Discuss] Is SplashTop really a revolution?

[Alan W. Irwin]

>From http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news&num=2007&q=09

"With the information we've been exposed to and our testing of SplashTop
thus far, we believe that this is the start of a revolution. This is not a
revolution for just saving a bit of time when your computer starts up, but
for the overhaul of the BIOS architecture and the conventional boot process,
increased power savings, and if capitalized right is yet another large
opportunity for Linux. We believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg
for DeviceVM and look forward to monitoring its progress especially over the
next three to nine months."

Fired up by this quote I looked further, and it turns out SplashTop is
disappointing from the digital freedom perspective.  From
http://www.splashtop.com/faq.php, SplashTop has a secret/proprietary core
which lives in the BIOS and which then quick-boots a specialized Linux from
Flash memory.  So it doesn't use LinuxBIOS (completely free BIOS software)
at all which makes (disappointing) sense since ASUS (the company using
SplashTop) has never cooperated much with the LinuxBIOS project.

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html has some additional background
on the campaign to obtain digital freedom for the BIOS through, e.g., using
LinuxBIOS rather than secret software for the BIOS.  It is a difficult but
important campaign because the PC hardware cartel lead by Intel (or at least
certain important factions within such large companies) appear to want to
retain the ability to enforce digital restrictions through the BIOS so the 
motherboard/hardware information necessary to get LinuxBIOS working is often
not forthcoming.

Although proprietary at its core, SplashTop is revolutionary in the sense
that it draws a lot of attention to what it is possible to do with the BIOS
if it were completely free since it is a worthwhile feature to have an
instant-on Linux environment where you can browse the web without having to
do a full time-consuming boot from hard disk. Also, a lot of SplashTop is
based on free/open source software so the necessary distribution of that
source code may encourage instant-on mini-distributions of Linux that are
based on LinuxBIOS.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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