5 ms·

I love their goals, and will be keeping a close eye on them as time goes by. If they really want to make a difference, they should open source their firmware,

I love their goals, and will be keeping a close eye on them as time goes by. If they really want to make a difference, they should open source their firmware, and use coreboot/libreboot. I've never understood what manufacturers had to gain from keeping their firmware closed source.

syntheticnature 10y ago
Gains: 1. Possibly required by any sources written by others (e.g. chip vendors). 2. You don't see how poorly written the firmware is.
yuhong 10y ago
Personally, I do wish that they would at least test the UEFI for common bugs like accessing boot services memory after ExitBootServices.
acdha 10y ago
Gains: 1. No issues with licensing for third-party components or drivers, which is most of them. 2. Reduced risk of source updates leaking news about new products and features 3. No need to spend time managing an open-source release process, ensuring that sensitive data isn't leaked outside, etc. Just the legal review for release & accepting contributions is not trivial. 4. No support requests from people who installed someone's fork with a bug in it. 5. Perceived less helpful to someone in a country with lax intellectual property enforcement making a knock-off device and undercutting you No matter how much you like open-source, there are real costs. You can make the argument that outside contributions will balance those out but that's hard for something like this because much of the cost is up front and all of the benefits are hypothetical future contributions and in the case of firmware relatively few people have the skills or interest to contribute. I might make the argument that the fixes you'd get are probably less frequent but higher value (thinking of e.g. sysadmins fixing difficult in-the-wild bugs which aren't easy to reproduce) but that's pure speculation.

5 ms·

I love their goals, and will be keeping a close eye on them as time goes by. If they really want to make a difference, they should open source their firmware,

by executesorder66 10y ago

syntheticnature 10y ago
Gains: 1. Possibly required by any sources written by others (e.g. chip vendors). 2. You don't see how poorly written the firmware is.
yuhong 10y ago
Personally, I do wish that they would at least test the UEFI for common bugs like accessing boot services memory after ExitBootServices.
acdha 10y ago
Gains: 1. No issues with licensing for third-party components or drivers, which is most of them. 2. Reduced risk of source updates leaking news about new products and features 3. No need to spend time managing an open-source release process, ensuring that sensitive data isn't leaked outside, etc. Just the legal review for release & accepting contributions is not trivial. 4. No support requests from people who installed someone's fork with a bug in it. 5. Perceived less helpful to someone in a country with lax intellectual property enforcement making a knock-off device and undercutting you No matter how much you like open-source, there are real costs. You can make the argument that outside contributions will balance those out but that's hard for something like this because much of the cost is up front and all of the benefits are hypothetical future contributions and in the case of firmware relatively few people have the skills or interest to contribute. I might make the argument that the fixes you'd get are probably less frequent but higher value (thinking of e.g. sysadmins fixing difficult in-the-wild bugs which aren't easy to reproduce) but that's pure speculation.