cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/11498663
Hello everyone,
In the wake of the recent Right to Repair Act (SB 244) enacted in California on October 10, 2023, the discourse around consumer rights and sustainable technological practices has intensified. A critical facet of this discourse is the BIOS/UEFI (Basic Input/Output System/Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), the fundamental firmware that initializes the hardware during the boot process of our computing devices.
Currently, BIOS/UEFI is largely under proprietary control, posing substantial barriers to our ability to repair, upgrade, and exercise full control over our own devices. This proprietary dominance not only stifles technological innovation and user freedom but also raises serious security concerns. The lack of transparency and verifiability inherent in closed-source firmware like Intel’s Management Engine (IME) and AMD’s Platform Security Processor (PSP) presents potential security vulnerabilities.
I am launching a petition on Change.org to advocate for Free and Open Source BIOS/UEFI. This initiative transcends personal control over our devices. It symbolizes a stride towards reducing electronic waste, promoting sustainability, and nurturing a culture where technology serves as a medium for empowerment rather than suppression.
The necessity for freedom in hardware firmware is clear. Open BIOS/UEFI furnishes a foundational level of control and understanding, dismantling barriers that keep users distanced from the core operations of their devices, and fostering a more inclusive and participatory technological ecosystem.
We are at a pivotal moment. The momentum nurtured by the Right to Repair movement invites us to extend the principles of openness and user empowerment to the foundational firmware of our devices. Our proactive stance today significantly influences our digital autonomy tomorrow.
The global advocacy for digital rights is reaching a crucial point, with a growing community rallying for more control, transparency, and accountability in the technology we use daily. The shift towards a more open and user-centric technological landscape is not just a fleeting trend, but a substantial movement that echoes the broader societal values of autonomy, privacy, and democratic engagement.
This petition endeavors to rally tech industry stakeholders and governmental bodies to advocate for the liberation of BIOS/UEFI from proprietary control. With open BIOS/UEFI, we inch closer to a technological landscape that aligns with democratic values, ensuring that technology serves the collective, not just a privileged few.
I invite you to sign the petition, disseminate it within your networks, and vocalize your support for a more open, sustainable, and democratically-aligned computing environment.
Together, through a shared vision and collective action, we can usher meaningful change in the technological domain.
Thank you for your support.
Devices with open BIOS/UEFI already exist, but nobody buys them. Check out System76 or Librem or NovaCustom or one of the many other places that sell devices with Coreboot on them.
Unfortunately, most customers care more about cheap laptops than they do about open laptops. If you sign this partition, also prove to computer manufacturers that there is demand for these devices by buying a computer with existing open bootloader support! There are even devices out there with the Intel ME pre-sabotaged so it can’t do anything harmful.
It should be noted that there is an open source UEFI implementation that is at the basis of many UEFI firmware packages; however, manufacturers often need to customise the open source part to make it work on their specific hardware configuration.
Exactly, manufacturers do play a big role in hardware configurations, and customization is often needed. Affordability is a big factor for most customers, and open devices can be expensive. Intel ME being proprietary is still a concern, even when disabled. Your support for making open BIOS/UEFI accessible to a wider audience is important. It’s about giving everyone the choice to control their devices.
hard to do that when such devices are unavailable in my country, and when they are, costing about thrice as much.
These companies make very little original hardware (Librem excluded, but that hardware doesn’t work for a few years after release). Most likely, you can find the hardware they use in their products and flash Coreboot yourself. How hard that is depends on what hardware you use. This will get you the same product but for much cheaper.
On Chromebooks this is actually relatively easy. The cheap nature of Chromebooks also helps keep the price down.
thats suboptimal at best. I checked, I’d need to be a firmware developer to get open fw to run on my hardware.
we need laws
Those devices are awesome, but they are too pricey for most of the customer.
That’s exactly the problem, practically all manufacturers get American Megatrends or the five or so competitors worldwide to program their BIOS, and add a tweak here and there to provide extra marketing value. It’s cheap because their contractor gets to hold their IP private so it can be resold for minimal cost, and the manufacturer doesn’t need to hire as many expensive firmware experts.
Opening all of that up would probably violate the existing contracts, so they’d need to start over to release an open version of their firmware. Even still, Intel and AMD rely on secrecy to keep their coprocessors secure (in other words, plenty of bugs to be find, but even if they did open the code, the keys are baked into hardware so you can’t do anything with them).
Many Coreboot computers are just cheapo Clevo laptops with firmware and drivers developed for them, so they’ll always be expensive. It’s a matter of supply and demand, without sufficient demand, supply will be limited and prices will remain high.
