On 05.11.21 19:10, ron minnich wrote:
I'd like to get back to a rating system. There's a really simple measure that I've never seen improved upon, namely, for a given firmware image, what fraction of the bits in that image come from open source code?
e.g., the KGPE-D16 would get a 100%, and a typical laptop would get 0%.
This is a really easy number to compute, automatically, and might even be an option to cbfstool or a ROM tool.
Marketing types are sensitive to numbers like this: we could prominently display these numbers on coreboot.org
I think it's a good idea. Not what I wanted to discuss though ;) It would be nice for marketing and end users. But I'm currently much more concerned with our development experience.
Very often, I see amidst the many patches that bring up a new platform, a tiny "bomb" that adds support for another kind of blob. When that's the first time a new kind of blob is mentioned, discussions around it get very intense quickly and can stall a project that was otherwise progressing well. Not to mention (mild) attacks on IRC I've seen.
So what I proposed was to give people some guidance how to avoid or defuse such a "bomb". That could be answering questions in advance, could be something else.
Nico