[coreboot] TALOS project short of funding goals - where to now?

Paul Menzel paulepanter at users.sourceforge.net
Wed Dec 14 00:43:45 CET 2016


Dear Elena,


Am Montag, den 12.12.2016, 14:50 +0100 schrieb Elena ``of Valhalla'':
> On 2016-12-12 at 13:18:42 +0100, Łukasz Dobrowolski wrote:
> > On 12/12/2016 03:27 AM, Taiidan at gmx.com wrote:
> > > (...) considering that the average linux sysadmin makes over
> > > $100K per year the community could have easily funded the
> > > project.
> > 
> > In Germany, US, France... Not in Poland, Ukraine... many hackers there.
> 
> Indeed. In my country 20k EUR per year is a good pay, but even with a
> pay of 60k EUR|$ a year, that would mean paying the whole earnings of a
> month for something that is still at the crowdfunding stage and may just
> disappear into nothing.
> 
> If you consider that people have to, well, live with that money, that
> would mean multiple months of savings / disposable income.
> 
> If somebody has a family, that probably goes in the range of expenses
> that have to be negotiated with the other family members.
> 
> All of this necessarily reduces the number of people who can even think
> about partecipating in that crowdfunding, not to say actually decide to
> put down their money for it.

Unfortunately, I don’t agree. There was the option to support the
project with less money. People can pledge $10, $250, or $500. In my
opinion, everybody interested in user-controlled hardware would be able
to spend at least $10. But it looks like there are well below 300
people interested in that. That is very sad to see, that people are not
willing to support to kick-start such a project to maybe profit in the
future from cheaper devices.

In my opinion, people are ignorant about the locked-down hardware issue
and some don’t care.

On the other hand, I also think, that maybe marketing was probably not
as successful as for other projects.

At least I didn’t see a lot of marketing support from the FSF, FSFE,
and EFF. The media also didn’t help very much.


Thanks,

Paul


PS: Wikipedia is also asking for donations right now. Despite the bad
things about Wikipedia, I guess most of us use it daily and want it to
remain maintained and free of advertisement.


[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstation
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