On a side note is there any kind of crowd sourcing platform / escrow
service for GPL projects? I know it's been talked about, and there have
been attempts made. But as far as I can tell, nothing has ever prospered.

If someone wanted to work with one of the approved coreboot contractors or individual contributor to set up a fundraiser of some sort to raise money to do things like this, that'd be great. We've had a requests for things like this in the past, but it's not something that the coreboot project itself can really do. We don't want to pit one group of coreboot developers against another, and the coreboot project also doesn't deliver binaries or sign contracts for work, so coreboot can't make guarantees about deliverables.I'd be happy to help get a fundraiser set up if anyone is interested in doing the work, but it's going to have to go through an actual fundraising site, and of course we'd want to have a full written plan before starting anything.

I've seen bountysource employed for various things in the past, from compatibility enhancements for POWER9 to GCC backend implementations for AVR. I think it's reasonably fair, with the bounty available to whoever is willing to put in the work to close the issue. The only thing missing that I can see is the need for an "issue" (a la github issues) that can be "closed" to trigger the end of the bounty. I don't know if gerrit supports such a functionality.

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 9:46 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

having read this discussion, and with all respect for all the opinions
so clearly expressed, I still support Arthur's original proposal.

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 2:20 PM David Hendricks
<david.hendricks@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>> 1. These boards will be gone for the people who check the "mainboards
>> supported by coreboot" and see only the "new Intel stuff". This
>> hinders the coreboot community growth around the "gone boards", and
>> also of the coreboot community in general: the fewer boards are
>> supported by coreboot, the more difficult it is for a potential
>> user/contributor to find the supported board and join us.
>
>
> For the record, we have removed Intel boards from the master branch in the past - See 4.11_branch. This was for boards that used FSP 1.0, including popular Baytrail Atom and Broadwell-DE platforms which are still widely used today. This ensures that those platforms continue existence on an easy-to-find stable branch where one can reasonably expect to check out the code and have it work. Checking out the master branch only to find out that it doesn't work and then bisecting years worth of commits is a poor user experience.
>
> Perhaps we should follow the 4.11_branch example and do something similar with old AGESA boards? Boards which are forward-ported and tested can stay (or be re-introduced) in the master branch, of course.
>
> Many of the AGESA platforms in the list Arthur provided are ~10 years old. Some are clearly obsolete, like the Gizmosphere boards that have not been in production for years and whose manufacturer is defunct. Others like the PCEngines APUs should be more readily available to test and have developers able to spend some time forward-porting the necessary bits.
>
> Lastly, I'll mention that there is an active crowdfunding effort to re-upstream KGPE-D16 support: https://github.com/osresearch/heads/issues/719. There's clearly a lot of enthusiasm with that board, and 3mdeb is already porting allocate v4 to it. Perhaps enthusiasts for other boards can piggyback on this effort and leverage some of their work to bring other boards up to date.
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