1) they or she 2) they are software people 3) There is a laptop out there with 'open' firmware you can find. flash all the chips to your liking, and have it som

1) they or she 2) they are software people 3) There is a laptop out there with 'open' firmware you can find. flash all the chips to your liking, and have it somewhat better than this situation. That being said of course you would have to develop your own operating system and user space for it otherwise it would be useless to go through the trouble... which is the part these people are mainly working on, since it's more practical to begin with. I hope with innovations in fpga and other types of programmable hardware ideas perhaps for low resource secure computing we can have some alternatives (for personal communciations etc.) while for high performance computing it will be ways to go before such a vendor would release something completly open and auditable. (intellectual property protection is too important (businesswise, not human-wise) in such a market unfortunatley to survive as a company who needs to invest years worth of revenue just to put up an assembly line...)