Laptop Vendor MALIBAL Suggests Not Supporting Coreboot

In a rather surprising post this morning, laptop vendor MALIBAL that offers both Linux and Windows systems is suggesting to not support the Coreboot project for open-source system firmware.

MALIBAL details their side of a 15-month effort to bring Coreboot to at least one of their laptops. Their post mainly outlines high consulting firm costs for specialists experienced in Coreboot development, poor communication from the firms/developers, and what they perceive as "incompetence from coreboot leaders and consultants."

MALIBAL commented in their post:

"Our efforts ultimately fell apart, not due to technical challenges, but because of what we see as unethical practices within the coreboot community."

Their issues fundamentally appear to boil down to high porting/development costs for the few consulting firms specializing in Coreboot development and not liking the communication experiences with the different firms. As a result of their interactions, they've even decided to block shipping of products to Germany, Poland, and Texas for where the developers/firms they interacted with are based. Similarly, they have banned AMD processors in their products due to interacting with a Coreboot developer employed by AMD.

As part of their conclusion they write:

"In the 6+ months that we tried working with these three coreboot developers, they didn’t write or debug a single line of code. Is that believable? No, it’s not.

And for the record, in all of our correspondence with the coreboot team, we never called anyone a monkey nor implied they were one, nor did we make any other overtly condescending remarks or insinuations. We used that sort of tone in this article to simply illustrate a point.

If we would have said something to the effect of, “We felt the experience was unsatisfactory and thought they could have done a better job…” it would not have in any way conveyed the magnitude of the actual emotional distress that we were subjected to, which can be proportionally measured in our response to ban their states and countries.

In all of our correspondence with these coreboot developers, we went out of our way to get along. But despite our best efforts, and putting up with all of their nonsense, we were ultimately thrown to the curb like trash.

Which is why anyone who supports the coreboot project after the post date on this article, including contributing code, being a member of their boards, or donating will be banned for life without exception."

Their post can be read on the MALIBAL blog.