[coreboot] Best supported modern laptop?

[Timothy Pearson]

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On 01/31/2017 12:52 PM, Philipp Stanner wrote:
>   Well, these are sad news.
> I'm surprised that the amount of blobs is so high in modern hardware.
> Without desiring to criticize or judge the project: What's the goal for
> the future, when even you admit that there's no great difference in
> technical aspects to vendor firmware?
> The sole purpose of free hardware may be honorable, but my personal
> believe is that efficiency is more important to people.

Note: I don't speak for the project here, these are just my thoughts...

I would think that coreboot's future lies in a non-x86 direction.  The
only two general purpose x86 vendors are targeting consumers and small
business, remain heavily tied to Microsoft, and really have no reason to
offer libre-friendly systems when their primary market is going to use
pre-packaged software.  Even better, by adding "security" and requiring
signing keys to boot said prepackaged software, some additional revenue
can be generated from the software vendors.

It's interesting that you bring up efficiency as the end user's primary
goal; in our experience inexpensiveness linked with ease of use are the
primary goals of a typical end user.  As a result, libre software is
increasingly marginalised; I don't think libre software as we know it
will easily survive the transition to cloud services.  Sure, there will
be exceptions like Launchpad that are released under the AGPL, but in
general the trends are very clear -- the masses are clamoring for
everything to be cloud based, and the manufacturers / software vendors
are more than happy to comply as not only does no IP need to be released
(either in source or binary form), but a steady revenue stream is
virtually guaranteed -- if not from direct leasing fees, then from
personal data mining and sale of targeted advertisements.

I predict libre software will be relegated to a (licensed?) userspace
component on consumer systems at some point.  Libre software as we know
it may live on in retrocomputing and certainly in large business (cloud
providers), but its heyday is over.

Just my $0.02 :D

- -- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
+1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line)
+1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard)
https://www.raptorengineering.com
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