flashrom discord channel

[Anastasia Klimchuk]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to share that there is a #flashrom channel on discord. It
existed for a while, but I only very recently learned about it. I
suspect it might be the same for many people who have no idea the
channel exists.

I updated the Contacts page (old and new) with the info: see
https://www.flashrom.org/Contact#Discord
or check the latest doc/contact.rst in your repo,
and follow the invite link.

The channel is on the coreboot server, so if you join you get all of
coreboot and flashrom channels in one place, which is convenient.

See you there,

[Greg Troxel]

Anastasia Klimchuk  writes:
> I wanted to share that there is a #flashrom channel on discord. It
> existed for a while, but I only very recently learned about it. I
> suspect it might be the same for many people who have no idea the
> channel exists.
>
> The channel is on the coreboot server, so if you join you get all of
> coreboot and flashrom channels in one place, which is convenient.

I am surprised to see a proprietary service being used, given the aims
of the coreboot community.  (This is merely an expression of surprise; I
don't have the spare energy to try to set up something Free-er.)

[Stefan Reinauer]

On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 11:03 AM Greg Troxel  wrote:
> Anastasia Klimchuk  writes:
> > I wanted to share that there is a #flashrom channel on discord. It
> > existed for a while, but I only very recently learned about it. I
> > suspect it might be the same for many people who have no idea the
> > channel exists.
> >
> > The channel is on the coreboot server, so if you join you get all of
> > coreboot and flashrom channels in one place, which is convenient.
>
> I am surprised to see a proprietary service being used, given the aims
> of the coreboot community.  (This is merely an expression of surprise; I
> don't have the spare energy to try to set up something Free-er.)

It's not just the energy, but also opportunity cost of course.

My general answer is that the coreboot project is about creating boot
firmware, and not about chat clients.
coreboot has been on Discord for a fair amount of time now, and even much
longer on Slack. None of us
give up on having a phone even though the phone network is not open source
either. The challenge is not
to find a solution but to find a solution that scales to the size of the
communities and to the various needs
(ie. have something that works well both on a computer and on mobile)

We generally have gone through phases of trying free tooling and this topic
keeps coming up of course.
Especially for our community video conferences we would love to use
solutions like jitsi as well. Problem
is that it never scaled reliably to more than 3 people.

I really encourage people interested in creating free communication tools
to join these projects and make
a difference there. Projects like flashrom and coreboot would certainly
benefit.

Stefan