@mia @a1ba @RedTechEngineer Porting coreboot and then cleaning the proprietary software out seems extremely hard, but maybe it's easier than getting freedom on a ARM SoC?

@mia @a1ba @RedTechEngineer Having to reverse engineer hardware to turn proprietary drivers into free drivers (and running into copyright issues etc) can be harder than working out how to configure coreboot's build system with the correct options to produce a working image (as there's a free chipset driver and free RAMinit etc already).

@mia @Suiseiseki @RedTechEngineer I love installing vendor fork of linux 4.19 with broken drivers for all IP blocks made by them in house in 2025

@mia @a1ba @RedTechEngineer But that board still ran proprietary software at the end.

@Suiseiseki @RedTechEngineer @mia does vendor's u-boot and atf forks can be considered proprietary software?

They published the source code. And there is nothing in between except what's in maskrom

@a1ba @RedTechEngineer @mia Imaginary property does not exist; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Vendors have broken drivers for peripheral devices and even the main SoC - with the only property being you being property of the vendor if it's proprietary.

@Suiseiseki @RedTechEngineer @mia it doesn't change the fact about vendor being unable to write drivers for what they literally made

@a1ba @RedTechEngineer @mia Why would they bother?

The whole idea is that they provide something that barely works and then the device goes out of support in a year and then you need to buy the next model and see if that works better (it works worse).

@Suiseiseki @RedTechEngineer @mia like with the whole computer industry, they are not really special in that regard.