IBM Corp has confirmed that its Power Personal systems will not support Open Firmware in their first incarnation. Neither will Motorola Inc’s Firmware 3.0 software, all of which is odd, since both companies have been the moving forces behind the PowerPC Reference Platform in the first place. Both companies tell essentially the same story – they had to start developing machines before the standard was fixed and they didn’t have time to duplicate Firmware efforts subsequently to track the standard. That’s fair enough, except that other companies do have chips today that presumably IBM and Motorola could have bought in and used. IBM and Motorola would no doubt argue that switching to Open Firmware on their own machines would necessitate other changes to peripherals and boot devices that they do not have time to make. So IBM is promising Open Firmware support in the next revision of its Power Personal systems, though whether it means future PowerPC Reference Platform machines, or a forthcoming Common Hardware Reference Platform range, is not clear. However, Motorola’s decision to send out a high-profile press release detailing the delights of Firmware 3.0 looks an odd way to promote the standard. Motorola vice-president and director of RISC software Anne-Marie Larkin told our sister publication PowerPC News that the company would have its own Open Firmware implementation ready during the second half of the year. Since Firmware 3.0 will not hit general availability until this quarter, it does not give Motorola’s OEM customers very long to design and build a machine before they find themselves with obsolescent Firmware. Moreover, Ms Larkin says Motorola gives all its OEM partners details of companies offering Open Firmware components anyway. So why bother continuing the development of its own proprietary Firmware? She pointed out that Motorola’s effort does have some advantages, such as its ability to support boards developed for iAPX86-based personal computers, and its compact size. Does any of this actually matter, or is it merely a semantic nicety whether vendors can slap ‘PReP-compliant’ labels on their boxes? In fact it does matter to two groups of people: those manufacturing add-in boards, and users that might want to buy them. Owners of first generation PowerPC-based machines will have to find out what kind of Firmware their boxes use before buying peripherals needed at boot-up. And peripheral makers will have to choose which version to target. Compare this with the situation where one add-in board should work across any PowerPC Reference Platform system, and Apple Computer Inc’s forthcoming Peripheral Component Interconnect-based Power Macs.
