This is kind of like the Wordpress story where early on before WPEngine had responded publicly, someone said<p>"I have heard <i>only</i> Wordpress's side of the story, and that has made me conclude that Wordpress are in the wrong."<p>We have heard <i>only</i> Malibals side of the story, and it makes me think it's most likely them who are the most at fault.
The "banning whole countries/states for life" thing was incredibly childish & actually made me laugh. I thought this was a parody until I read it completely.<p>But I didn't know it was that bad in the firmware space.
While I can understand the author’s frustration, the whole «banning tech/country» based on one experience with one person from said country/tech is taking it too far.<p>In addition, specifically outing people like this by name without letting them have any chance to respond in the article is unprofessional, especially since it isnt needed in order to drive the point home.
Meanwhile StarLabs regularly cranks out coreboot firmware for their different products with like three in-house developers. Guess you just need to put your mind to it.<p><a href="https://github.com/StarLabsLtd/firmware">https://github.com/StarLabsLtd/firmware</a>
> Due to this experience with 9Elements, we banned the entire country of Germany for life.<p>> Due to this experience with 3MDeb, we banned the entire country of Poland for life.<p>> Due to this experience with Matt DeVillier, we banned the entire state of Maryland for life.<p>> UPDATE 2: System76’s Principal Engineer decided to chime in and make a fool of himself, so we banned the entire state of Colorado for life.<p>My sides!
Their ToS is hilarious. You are not allowed to access the site with an Apple or Android device. Not use Chrome or register with a Gmail or Google suite email.<p>They actively don’t want any customers?
"We never received a quote for the actual porting, but they said the evaluation cost is typically 10% of the total cost, which would mean the porting would have cost around $33,000 for Dasharo-branded coreboot, and $66,000 for unbranded coreboot. Even their highly discounted Dasharo-branded porting comes out to around $250 to $330 an hour, and that’s if they started from scratch. We had 80%+ of the job already complete. We just needed to debug our code."<p>How can you be champion of open source if you employ such practices? Double the cost?
"We had to actually inform him that there is, in fact, a UART port on the motherboard for debugging purposes." I think he meant more than that. JTAG, USB gadget etc
Reading between the lines, I suspect these contractors were all relieved to have fired this troublesome customer. The public bans of entire regions for life after perceived grievances with individual people is not something a reasonable customer does. Asking your contractor to pay for a damaged wire on a used device you sent them and then using words like "gaslighting" and "sociopath" when he pushes back--this isn't normal. They keep insisting they just needed help with a little debugging--any programmer knows debugging is harder than writing the code initially. This customer doesn't seem worth it; they don't seem to have the professionalism necessary to manage a contractor project like this. This article does not make them look good.
Well, I would like to hear what the other side would say.<p>Although, if they were incapable of debugging their code, they, probably, had no expertise to provide estimations like "we did 80% of the job and just needed a little debugging".
A lot of business lessons here, and one of the deeper truths is that there are certain fields that at the crossroads of being extremely difficult and extremely niche, and when you reach that point your experience is mostly based on luck.