Hi Sheng, Couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to the open source community which I spent the most time mingling besides my previous company work. As many of you already know, I left the firmware field and thus 9elements to pursue my own startup. Thank you for the efforts you put into the coreboot project. We wish you a good start in your next adventure. P.S: Any coreboot forks (whatever you called it Masharo or Pipapo), please pay your due in upstreaming your changes back to the main coreboot branch - especially for those companies who are having good profits (you know who you are) but refuse to actively contributing back to the community: maybe I will still come after you if I have too much free time; unless be a good boy and stop leaching for greed and profits, after all you are taking big advantage of the hard work from all the community members. Have some dignity.
We have to contradict this statement.
Though we all love open source and an upstreaming approach would be the ideal one, we understand that there are people or companies out there who cannot follow this in the first place. The reasons for this vary a lot, depending on many factors like customer commitments, time to market and restricted access to required assets. Therefore, having a development on behalf of a coreboot distribution can still be beneficial to the coreboot project itself as in the end it is still coreboot and GPL. And it witnesses even a healthy ecosystem if there are multiple distributions of the core project available, as this proves the interest in the core project (i.e. coreboot). Often, features and patches developed for a distribution will find their way back into upstream if the circumstances change later (e.g. the SoC in question and/or its documentation is now publicly available). Because even the distributions do benefit if the amount of patches they have to maintain is limited compared to the latest upstream.
Therefore, the coreboot project does not discourage any party from driving their own development under the GPL hood for their needs and provides coreboot support for current devices. And if these parties can make a business with this approach, this is fine. Having diversity was always a good indication for a healthy approach, just have a look at the Linux ecosystem.
Sincerely,
your coreboot project leadership