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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Generally, motherboard manufacturers source their components from other companies. They do not manufacture the entire board themselves. This includes CPUs, Wifi cards, USB controllers, bluetooth, audio, display controllers, etc. Each and every one of them create new products, maintain their own firmware for all those new products, and push updates to the motherboard manufacturers when there are updates.
Coreboot/libreboot do not update those components themselves. They also must be provided that source code.
Just for coreboot alone, the last release had more than 120 contributors push over 900 commits. One person is not able to maintain that piece of software, as it is an enormous task.
If the problem was getting it to work in the first place, then you would be right.
But once code is there and working, maintenance is an easier problem especially since git is involved.
Binary blobs on the other hand are just endless pain and only get worse with time.
In the words of Bryan Cantrill, we are at war with proprietary firmware and unfortunately at this moment in the war we are losing.
Even if the code is there, you will need someone to maintain that code. Easier or not, even in a git repository, those individual components will eventually not have the support necessary to patch it.
If an eight year old usb controller has flaws, and the manufacturer is not maintaining that git repository anymore because they cannot possibly afford to hire someone to look at that code after so long, then it is going to keep those flaws. It wont matter if that code is proprietary or open source and included in coreboot. Its just simply not feasible to support hardware properly once most of the world has moved on to other products.
We agree that we can not expect companies to support products beyond the timeframe which they expect to sell and support their own products. Code under FSF approved licenses means that anyone can say, “I need this supported” and choose to pay anyone that they want to get support. Or at the barest minimum, ensure existing functionality is not removed from them, just because company A demands that you their customer should buy something newer and that it would be in their financial best interest to brick their customers’ shit.
I wish all the firmware for every motherboard was made public and open sourced. Even if a company has proprietary firmware/drivers, I would hope that once that product reaches end of life that they do in fact open source that code so that someone else can pick up where they left off.
I 100% agree that they should not brick their hardware once it reaches end of life. There might be someone out there who would take on the task of maintaining it, which is better than nobody maintaining it.