What the heck is is Open BIOS and why should we even care? Well if you are interested in more control over your PC, you ought to care very much I think.

On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux® kernel loaded and running. This article gives a brief overview of the field.
BEEP!
While it may seem that PC hardware beeps when it is powered on as a matter of course, in fact, there’s a bit of code that makes that beep happen. That piece of code is the boot firmware. On most PCs, it’s called the BIOS. (The word is an acronym for basic input/output system.) The BIOS provides the underlying hardware support that early x86 operating systems used to access disks, monitors, and just about everything else.
One of the first things the BIOS does is perform various power-up tests: identifying (and possibly testing) available memory, determining clock speeds, and so on. If the tests succeed, the machine beeps once. This process is referred to as a power-on self test, or POST. Computer geeks being what they are, the term is often used as a verb: “That machine won’t even POST, so we should swap the memory.”…. Source: IBM