Hi Everyone and Happy New Year.
This summer I'm planning to buy new laptop. Also ongoing debates related to UEFI transition and current implementation of 'Secure Boot' requirement imposed by Microsoft's Windows 8 certification got me thinking and I would like to share my idea and see how many people have similar thoughts. Basically boils down to create Coreboot Reference Hardware for development, testing and daily use of coreboot. Here is my plan (warning it is not very well thought through):
1. See how many people are ready to buy new hardware and are interested to work on coreboot advancement. 2. If we have something like 10 people we can work together to define the spec sheet of 'perfect' laptop. 3. Once we have the spec sheet it should be very easy to find OEM and place one single order. In my experience 10 people buying same laptop will have zero impact, but 1 person buying 10 laptops gets notice right away, especially if the order is placed with small OEM. I suspect it will take some time and we might go over several upgrade cycles before we get where I would like, but if we make steady progress and get more people on-board we can get to the point where we can order custom systems that are build to our spec and get cooperation from interested commercial entities. 4. Once we have our identical hardware in hands of different developer we can employ divide and concur strategy in order to overcome any problems we will encounter making coreboot better then original UEFI/BIOS. 5. I was thinking to do this with laptop, but I do realize that could be more easy done using desktop motherboard. So, if we agree on the plan of action we can buy mainboards instead of laptops. 6. I also recognize that big group of coreboot developers are located in EU, so we might have to place two separate orders: one in USA and other in EU because we don't want to deal with import/export problems. We are going to have enough problems porting coreboot to new laptop.
What do you guys think? Am I completely crazy to believe that we can make material change in our industry?