I’ve been playing around with Stellar web installer and it’s… interesting. Not surprisingly, it violates GPL, but getting MakeMHz to respect other programmers’ licensing is a lost cause, which is a big part of the reason why I won’t buy Stellar. Anyway, that’s beside the point.
Normally, you need to have Stellar hooked up to your PC for the installer to do anything, but it’s trivial to override the JavaScript that checks for this and proceed to the part where the installer asks you to “upload” the 5838 BIOS image. The BIOS is then “unpacked” and the kernel decrypted, uncompressed and extracted, and that unmodified kernel is what gets flashed to Stellar, where it is presumably patched and assembled into a valid BIOS. It’s possible to add a few lines of JavaScript to save the kernel as a file instead of sending it directly over USB and see exactly what gets flashed to Stellar, but I’m hesitant to provide any such code given MakeMHz’s tendency to abuse DMCA claims.
When it was first announced, the press release claimed that StellarOS uses a “reimplemented” kernel, but I fail to see where “reimplementation” comes into play. To me, this implies that MakeMHz built the functional equivalent of Microsoft’s kernel using none of the original code. Patching code into Microsoft’s kernel or utilizing any portion of Microsoft’s kernel code to build StellarOS disqualifies it as a reimplementation of the kernel, in my opinion. And I’m not a lawyer, but it doesn’t seem super legal on MakeMHz’s behalf, either, to claim and utilize Microsoft’s code as their own. The press release shames the shit out of other BIOS makers for using source code stolen from Microsoft to produce their BIOS, but using Microsoft’s binary code is fair game? It makes very little sense to me.
It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something, so hopefully someone with more knowledge than me than can clarify.