Coreboot Issues Rebuttal To Recent Laptop Vendor Controversy

Following the rather bizarre blog post two weeks ago of laptop vendor MALIBAL suggesting not supporting Coreboot due to their frustrating experiences dealing with Coreboot consulting firms, the Coreboot project itself has now issued a response.

MALIBAL published a public blog post entitled "Don't Support the Coreboot Project" and detailed their side of the experience in trying to get Coreboot onto some of their laptops. But they ended up being so upset with the experience due to the projected costs and delays that they wrote the blog post as well as ended up banning sales to states/countries from where the firms are based. In checking their blog post while writing this latest article, MALIBAL has now also "banned the entire state of Colorado for life" after comments made on Twitter/X by one of the System76 engineers over the situation.

Posted today is the Coreboot Project's rebuttal to the situation. Some highlights:

"Recently there was a blog post by MALIBAL, a disgruntled laptop vendor who attempted to port coreboot to their rebranded white label laptop. The cause of the kerfuffle they describe is that they failed in their own attempt to port coreboot to their laptop, then approached a few of our consultants and community members claiming the code was “80+%” complete and that they just needed help with “debugging.”

Each attempt was terminated in the evaluation phase, however, as the consultants and vendor disagreed on the amount of remaining effort and the supplied hardware had problems (flash read/write problems, UART access barely possible) which could not be resolved easily. Additionally, this person’s attitude and communication style was, to put it mildly, very off-putting.
...
It is important to emphasize that contact with this laptop vendor was terminated early in the process. Aside from NDAs that are common for new product development, no contracts or statements of work were signed and no money changed hands. Any suggestion from this vendor’s blog that a coreboot consultant failed to deliver on work they were hired or paid to do is false and defamatory."

The Coreboot blog post can be read in full on Coreboot.org.

Update: 9elements Security as one of the Coreboot consulting firms originally contacted by MALIBAL has also posted their statement on the matter.