Am So., 1. Sept. 2019 um 23:55 Uhr schrieb Timothy Pearson < tpearson@raptorengineering.com>:
This is an interesting take on the situation. Can you point to even one instance in the past few years where this strategy has yielded less vendor proprietary firmware (in terms of percentage of vendor firmware binary size to utilized coreboot codebase binary size) for a top-of-the-line platform vs. the older platforms? Is the trend line even going in the right direction?
You seem to mix up the temporary wins we had around 2007 (which involved, among other things, pressure put on vendors by what amounts to the CTO of a major industrial nation) with the original state of PC-era firmware. The trendline starts at 0 LOC that are open source.
we have reached the point where people are starting to simply say "the proprietary code is mandatory and unremovable, let's try to reverse engineer it instead to determine if it is safe enough to use since there is no other option". That capitulation means we've lost entirely when measured against the origins and above-stated goals of the coreboot project.
But that's how the project started out!
The early work was grassroots efforts inside mainboard vendors. That hinged on enthusiastic developers at mainboard vendors staying where they are (instead of furthering their careers and leaving their toys behind) and flying under the radar (which pretty much implies "doesn't scale": as soon as that stuff is noticed by silicon vendors, they shut it down through updated contracts).
Later, coreboot was picked up by government IT with high security needs. While you can get pretty powerful people to support you here, it's still only a tiny market. How often can you put pressure on a silicon vendor in that situation before they ask you to shove it? (experience says: not that often)
Where we are now is high volume deployments (Chromebooks on the portable side, Facebook infrastructure on the datacenter end). Again both of these started out at 0 LOC open source less than 10 years ago.
I like our trend lines (although I'd prefer them to be steeper, too).
Again, I ask that the Website be updated to better reflect the distinction between project aspirations with no industry backing and the actual, on the ground reality of the situation, not just today, but over the past several years.
The mission statement of a hunger aid program isn't "feed 500k people", it's "end hunger". "Feed 500k people" is just a milestone.
Patrick