Dear Richard,
I honestly want to apologize if you understood my (undoubtably scathing) remark as an accuse of racism. This was by no means my intention (and would undoubtedly be absurd, as you reckoned).
Instead my point was that following the boycott of a political, religious or societal leading figure under the semblance of idealism can indeed have undesirable results. In the case that I mentioned, the results were not as fatal for us, but still a further obstacle to cope with.
I might be indicted for judging people by the results of their actions rather than their intent, and probably also being snappy about this. Nonetheless, I believe we do have the same goals, namely getting as many vendors to support coreboot. Now, however, I don't think a boycott, or keeping a vendors marketing support guys busy will have the effect that we desire. People stop listening to you, if they feel accused -- I fear I proved that point almost too clearly. In fact, this mailing list has a very long history of side blows against certain less-than-desired cooperative vendors, and I am inclined to say that it got us nowhere.
My suggestion is that we try to work with these guys, and find the right people inside the vendors and convince them that helping coreboot can only be a corporate advantage for them. I _know_ there is quite a reasonable number of such people in any of the corporations we're facing, including both Intel and NVidia. These are huge corporations, and finding the right people and building up a reliable and complementary relationship between them and our community is a challenge that can take years of work.
Again, please accept my apologies for the misunderstandings I seem to have caused. I really appreciate your efforts in our project. Now let's figure out how we can make our goals actually become reality.
Best regards, Stefan