Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot

Re:Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot by Krutonium on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @02:52AM (#48457491)

As with many things, this is a case of "it depends" - How you do it and for what reason, primarily. If you're reverse engineering code that's part of a DRM scheme for example, that's explicitly not allowed.

Coreboot is debatable for this, it's fine in the sense that nobody is going to come after you for it, but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement, which is fundamentally different to the Phoenix BIOS clone, and not in a good way.

But as I said, nobody is going to come after you for it so...

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Re:Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot by ivas on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @01:35PM (#48464450)

> but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement

Interesting legal question: if Claude reverse engineers the original and writes a spec, and ChatGPT implements the spec without seeing the original, is that a clean-room implementation? Asking for a friend with a trillion parameters

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Re:Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot by Krutonium on Saturday June 20, 2026 @04:46AM (#48607522)

Depends? Honestly if you just cleaned Claude's memory (or had 2 distinct instances that can't communicate other than the spec), claude could do both.

But honestly this is going to have to be tested in court. Also, IANAL.

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