[coreboot] Coreboot Purism BIOS is free? open?

[Taiidan at gmx.com]

On 12/18/2017 01:59 PM, Youness Alaoui wrote:

> As for Taiidan's response, I think Matt's response to it is pretty
> good already, and I'm tired of seeing Taiidan jumping at the chance to
> talk against Purism every chance he gets
I simply want people to have all the facts before they spend thousands 
on a computer - as I have stated before you guys really need to change 
your marketing as it is confusing a lot of people.

I of course would be more than happy to assist with this task, please 
remember *people are still going to purchase your products if your 
marketing is entirely up front and honest* - will you loose a few sales? 
of course, but it is better to do that then have unhappy customers.

I humbly request:
Remove "Libre" from the product names,
Remove "every chip hand selected to respect privacy" (Intel chips do not 
do this),
Clearly mention and define the difference between a coreboot device with 
FSP and one without in the product description
Please stop the requests for the FSF to bend the RYF rules so your 
devices can be RYF certified.
Remove the "Road to RYF" page - as it is entirely impossible for a 
modern intel device to be RYF certified.

I have never met a layman who didn't think that "coreboot" means 
entirely open source hardware initiation (as it used to mean that before 
FSP) and I have conversed with a variety of people who have bought or 
are considering buying a purism or ORWL computer - they are always 
surprised and unhappy when I explain.
> * You seem to think that the purism laptops are selling at a premium
> because it comes with coreboot?
They are, which isn't an issue (I know how much even a FSP coreboot 
board port costs) if someone insists on brand new hardware.
> * You said "they are charging for a whitebox re-brand.", that's
> actually a completely false statement, the motherboard is our own and
> it is designed to avoid having any firmware-based hardware so a
> binary-blob-free linux distribution can run on it. It is not a
> whitebox re-brand. If it was a whitebox re-brand, then yeah, we'd be
> selling for a lot lower price considering we'd be able to also take
> advantage of the economies of scale.
As I recall at least the earlier laptops were in fact reference designs 
complete with OEM provided windows licenses.
The blobs on a modern laptop are all peripheral related such as wi-fi 
and touchpad, if you have in fact spent money on a custom board fab I do 
not understand what made it worth it.
> * You are encouraging the purchase of lenovo machines, but as far as I
> know, lenovo is not actively working on reverse enginering the FSP.
> Also, the only reason that Lenovo can have a libreboot running on it
> is because the community did the port, not because the company itself
> is working towards freeing it or investing anything to provide more
> freedom to users.
Yes obviously, but people who purchase used machines are not supporting 
lenovo.

Reverse engineering FSP but always providing brand new hardware is a 
contradiction, it would take years and cost hundreds of thousands for 
every intel hardware revision. I do not understand how you will be able 
to afford this and again plead for the efforts to be re-directed to a 
high performance ARM laptop with for example an AppliedMicro CPU that 
could be owner controlled - currently all ARM laptops are very slow.
>   So yeah, sure, you could say "don't pay a 30$
> premium for coreboot, buy a lenovo and do the port yourself" (assuming
> you know how to do the port, or you buy one that is already ported) ,
> but you might as well say "don't pay a 30$ premium for coreboot, buy a
> lenovo, do the port yourself, then reverse engineer the FSP yourself
> while you're at it" and it would be more accurate. And that's of
> course ignoring the question of the harware kill switches, the fact
> that you can't compare a 200$ refurbished laptop from 6 years ago with
> a higher priced laptop from today
The Lenovo G505S is from three years ago and it uses the FT3 platform, I 
still would like to know as to why you guys didn't use that as it was 
brand new when you first started selling laptops - it was just as fast 
and open source firmware could be easily made for it as it has no 
hardware code signing enforcement or ME/PSP...

It isn't as if a x86-64 board that isn't absolutely brand new is 
useless, I can play modern games on my KGPE-D16 without any issue with a 
2013 CPU (not 2008)
> * We worked on disabling the ME on the purism laptops. Yes, the lion's
> share of the work was done by others (Corna for me_cleaner and
> Positive Technologies for the HAP bit), but not only did it require a
> significant amount of work from our side as well, to test, validate
> and package the ME disablement work (see above blog post link), but we
> are the first manufacturer to offer it standard and without us doing
> it, it could be argued whether or not this differentiation would have
> convinced System76 and Dell to also pursue offering machines with the
> ME disabled. So, encouraging those who are trying to pioneer the work
> might actually help the entire community. Do you think it might
> convince Intel to offer ME-less designs if they see half the
> manufacturers starting to ship unofficially-disabled ME machines?
Intel will never do that - they have absolutely zero monetary reasons to 
do so - even a Fortune 50 company like google can't get them to free ME 
let alone FSP or even provide the documentation for google to do it 
themselves.

If you are absolutely committed to x86-64 (which like tim I believe it 
is the wrong choice) it would be better to go with AMD as they at least 
are entertaining the idea of a CPU without PSP (an AMD PR guy on reddit 
claims that it has "CEO level attention") and are a much smaller company 
so less bureaucracy.

I believe in 10 years people will still be hoping that one day x86-64 
will be free and saying just-a-little-bit-longer, instead of focusing on 
alternative architectures that are owner controlled.

People said there will never be linux gaming, now there are regularly 
AAA game releases on linux and I believe we can achieve a POWER gaming 
community as well. I have talked to several indie game developers and 
they are open to the idea if it doesn't cost them anything (as being the 
first POWER game would result in free publicity for them) and that was 
where it started for linux...indie devs later AAA studios.