Bruce,
I have no beef with you, but you are the closest to a communications channel with AMD that the community is given access to, so I pass my comments to you.
Bruce Griffith wrote:
To get to an open-source AGESA, there were meetings and rules put in place within AMD with the intent that AMD would never lose proprietary license or ownership of the trunk AGESA or CIM-X codebases resulting from the contribution.
As these contributions started to flow into the community many years ago, you may remember that I guessed that such rules would exist and asked *literally* what those rules were. You may also remember that there was *NO* response whatsoever.
The principal rules are that:
Three (is it four? five?) years later it is nice to see these rules finally confirmed. Of course, by now, all of us fools have already been able to deduce them.
Unfortunately, by not communicating with the community, AMD has caused a significant amount of uncertanity and confusion within the project. Because community projects are supposed to be about collaboration and communication, this has placed AMD in a worse position than anyone wished for.
Although coreboot has received contributions from AMD over a long time already, it is also painfully obvious that AMD still has some ways to go until they can get proper returns on their investment in coreboot.
You may understand that I, as a volunteer, can only do *so* much to help AMD make the most of coreboot. I believe I have asked exactly the right questions but without dialogue there can not be progress.
AMD accepted that the process of releasing into open-source would be a very large and time-consuming task.
It is obviously backwards. I wonder, if someone in those meetings suggested "let's make the open-source code our HEAD so that we only have to scrub once and worst-case only incrementally thereafter".
Major corporations like AMD are perfectly capable of contributing to and even running open source projects. There are many sources of inspiration.
AMD realized that the open-sourcing process they developed was awkward and required lots of developer and legal involvement.
I think you understand that the community is quite frustrated since many attempts were made right at the start to explain that this would be the case. Community members with any meaningful open source experience immediately recognize how resource intensive the scrubbing process would be for AMD.
The six month delay required to implement the “scrub” prevents AMD Embedded from capitalizing
But ultimately this is AMD's problem and not coreboot's.
Please remember that AMD’s primary goal in open-source AGESA is to enable new platforms to sell more chips.
Please remember that the project's primary goal is to create an open source firmware.
Binary PI
..is not open source firmware, is it?
By donating AGESA as a binary instead of scrubbed open-source, coreboot becomes available
That's false. coreboot is an open source project. Binary PI is not open source, so can not be part of coreboot. If it were, coreboot's GPL would make a combination of the two difficult to use.
This is good for AMD and good for companies that want to use AMD’s chips.
It is however not good for coreboot, the open source firmware project.
I would propose forking open-source AGESA within the coreboot tree. What do you think … ?
Let's not be in such a hurry to make changes for once, let's try to think this thing through?
Industry contributors appear unable to see the forest for all the trees.
I notice a trend within governments to require more transparency from IT equipment suppliers. It will take a couple of years, but those requirements will eventually bubble up also to Intel and AMD, who will have to either open up or lose market share. Things will progressively get worse for anyone who insists on remaining opaque, as industry starts adopting the very same requirements as the government.
I predict that whoever opens up first has a great advantage in winning contracts over the next 5 years, but what do I know.
//Peter