[coreboot] [Fwd: Re: Contact Intel]

[Richard M Stallman]

You have no hope of influencing a large company through channels like
this one.  You are talking with a low-level person who has no
authority to change anything, and whose job is only to try to convince
you to accept what Intel is doing.

What you got is therefore only the statement Intel uses to justify
not cooperating with us.

It could be that the Coreboot developers can find statements which are
misleading or false, and publish an article which would put pressure
on Intel. 

Some of the points are simply distractions or illogical.  For
instance:

    BIOS is a part of the reliability and performance promise of the
    hardware.

Is that true?  If so, so what?  That is no reason not to let us run
our own BIOS.

	       Chipset specifications at the level being discussed are
    commonly considered proprietary by all silicon vendors, not just
    Intel.

In other words, "Everyone spits on your freedom".  Even if it were
true, so what?

However, it is false: some computer models do work with free BIOS.
Intel compares badly with them.  This is one of the statements that
maybe could be criticized in a published response.

    The open source firmware work that Intel *is* sponsoring could
    lead to a solution where proprietary low-level chipset
    initialization code from silicon vendors is made compatible with
    open source higher-level platform initialization and pre-boot
    management.

As they say, this is not a complete free BIOS, just part of one.

If the "proprietary low-level chipset initialization code" is in ROM
on the chips that it initializes, then it is tolerable.  (It might as
well be circuits on that chip.)  Otherwise, it is insufficient unless
made complete.