The edk2 project is a branch of edk, which itself is a branch. According to their about page the original tiano project was started in 2004 as the opensource fo

The edk2 project is a branch of edk, which itself is a branch. According to their about page the original tiano project was started in 2004 as the opensource fork of intel's internal uefi implementation. This did create some problems early on, but the code is basically BSD licensed at this point since AFAIK, they are dropping the bsd+patent restriction. So technically you could probably work on it without ever looking at the UEFI specifications these days as much of the platform code/etc is actually in a different repo. Given that its mostly a plugin API that isn't really a problem, its a matter of flipping a few switches in the config files to enable functionality on top of whatever platform init is necessary. https://www.tianocore.org/ https://www.tianocore.org/