Coreboot Drama

I’m still in the progresss of reading the Coreboot drama, but it’s facinating enought to share it already.

Long story short, it’s a story of a company that tried to use Coreboot (an open-source firmware for laptops, that is supposed to replace the proprietary BIOS/UEFI) in their laptops, but then had a god-awful experience with the different members of the Coreboot community, from consultants to the project leadership.

One thing that struck me is how you can be a complete asshole and still be in the tech industry (again). I mean, I know that it’s not a meritocracy, but still, how these people get a job?

Just one quote from the article:

A lot of Christian’s emails looked like they were written by a 12-year-old on their phone. He didn’t capitalize the first letter of a lot of sentences, had obvious typos, and improper punctuation. He also had the habit of talking down to us, repeatedly trying to “put us in our place” and “set us straight” when we were just trying to get help debugging our code. I guess this is the level of service you get for $300 an hour in Germany.

I’m also surprised to see that these issues justified to Malibal the decision to forever ban selling all their laptops to Germany, it seems to me like an overreaction.

But I’m not in the business of selling laptops, so what do I know?

Update from October 21st

Okay, finished reading this article I now assess it as the usual “looks like no one is right here”.

I don’t think that the authors from MALIBAL are inventing the facts – I saw a lot of hard-to-stomach engineers in my life. But from this whole article it seems that MALIBAL themselves are more than a bit overemotional and hence and tend to see the problem in anyone but themselves.