[coreboot] ASUS KCMA-D8 workstation board port offer

Fri Jan 20 14:15:05 CET 2017

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I'm just going to paste what I wrote on phoronix's comments section.

On 19/01/17 17:58, Timothy Pearson wrote:
> Sorry to revive an old thread, but as many of you are aware
> Minifree (Leah Rowe) contracted with us to port the KCMA-D8 and
> release it.  We performed this work and the KCMA-D8 continues to
> operate, however Minifree has decided not to pay their contract on
> this work.  We strongly recommend that no person do any business
> with Minifree or its founder Leah Rowe, as they do not honor their
> legally binding contracts.
> 
> 

I'm perfectly happy for Raptor to publicly complain. This is only
fair, and they have the right. However, there are certain facts that I
would like to point out clearly for the community.

Fact 1: I paid 100% of the KGPE-D16 contract with was 75k USD I did
not pay the KCMA-D8 contract which was 15k. Timothy's email implies
that I barely paid any of it. The D8 was a mere extension on top of
the D16 and was a few weeks work for Timothy. The article also implies
that I was unwilling to pay the remaining 15k. I was actually *unable*
to pay. Big difference. I fully paid for the KGPE-D16 contract, and
D16 is all that Minifree sells. Most people don't use D8 and it wasn't
viable to sell. I would also like to point out that several
organisations now use the KGPE-D16 with libreboot. This includes the
Free Software Foundation, to host their websites. I personally
sacrificed a lot to pull that off. I find it deeply insulting that
Timothy causes all this fuss about the D8. The D8 port was also
missold to me. I was lead to believe that the hardware was readily
available when it wasn't (unlike D16 hardware), so the work for the D8
was more or less a waste of resources.

Fact 2: Libreboot is not a dead project. We are currently working on a
new release behind the scenes. We've merged an entirely new build
system that was written from scratch, to replace the old one (the one
that is "stagnant and hard to use" according to the article). It's in
the libreboot git repository as I speak, it was merged a few days ago.
Please mention this. The new build system is extremely modern,
flexible and easy to use. It adds many features which the old build
system lacked, such as (but certainly not limited to):
* easy ability to build and integrate linux kernel payloads (*hint*
petitboot *hint*)
* integrates all chromebook-related utils, for rockchip ARM chromebooks
* integrates chromeos flashrom, in addition to upstream flashrom
* generally better design, more modular, easier to maintain, easier to
build
* plus a whole host of other advantages
* about 10 new chromebooks have been added to libreboot. So much for
libreboot being dead, eh?

Please also mention that Libreboot is actually abandoning coreboot and
will be using Librecore as upstream. This will be covered in my
upcoming FOSDEM talk too. We have been quite public about this
already, on the Libreboot bug tracker.

I would also like to point out, that so far Raptor Engineering has not
fixed the bug on KGPE-D16 where above 128GiB RAM becomes unstable to
the point of being unusable. Only up to 128GiB works. This is less
than what the contract suggests. They also released source code that
was broken; memory initialization was broken on most memory modules.
It took 6 months after the initial release of the KGPE-D16 source code
for them to make memory initialization work, and even now raminit only
works with a few modules.

This is in addition to other bugs which they haven't fixed. I also
have IRC logs of private conversations between me and Timothy, where
he states that he's willing to let the free/libre hardware movement
crash and burn. This was before the dispute that happened yesterday
regarding payment.

- -- 
Leah Rowe

Libreboot developer

Use free software. Free as in freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

Use a free operating system, GNU+Linux.
https://libreboot.org/docs/distros/
Or BSD:
https://libreboot.org/docs/bsd/

Use a free BIOS.
https://libreboot.org/

Support computer user freedom.
https://peers.community/

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