AMD made their platform code work for coreboot. That is, the same code they ship to board and BIOS makers, they release to coreboot, and even went the extra mile to integrate it.
Intel doesn't support coreboot. In fact, they hinder us and we'll have to get each bit of information out of the hardware or by massive coercion. Every support of Intel hardware in coreboot exists despite Intel's efforts.
That issue has been debated and refuted before git even existed: http://www.monotone.ca/docs/Hash-Integrity.html
There's also venti of plan9 that uses SHA-1 for content addressing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti
But of course, they must be all wrong.
"corporations who see their employees as means to an end rather than the end itself" - Human resources are an expense not an asset, bringing in no value. At least from the bean counters' point of view.
That's why one of the first thing consultants (eunuchs: they know how to do it) recommend is to lay off employees - it's a "simple" step in cutting down a huge piece of the expenses with no value lost.
If they turn a profit on each kinect sold, then even those that are never attached to an xbox360 will help recoup R&D costs.
Intel delivers all of their boot support code as EFI drivers these days.
But not as open source. Tiano is a huge bunch of code, but the really interesting bits aren't in there.
EFI is much better than BIOS. It runs in full 32/64 bit mode.
coreboot welcomes you to 1999. Besides that: why is it that EFI exists in "either 32 or 64bit", instead of cleanly supporting both? The additional complexity of thunking libraries can't be it, as tiano already provides a runtime loader to resolve in-flash libraries...
Booting Intel machines is really fucking complicated, and EFI makes it much simpler.
Sorry, but EFI is fucking complicated, too. runtime linker - I rest my case.
It's just that you don't have to care about this complexity when intel provides the closed source components to you to plug in.
The most reasonable action about EFI over the last few years was the EFI shell effort. Finally Intel admits that they designed an operating system instead of a hardware bringup.
OpenBIOS is used for some OpenFirmware platforms in QEmu mostly.
It's partially obsoleted by three separate OpenFirmware implementations released under BSD-like licensing later-on, which had real world exposure (unlike OpenBIOS, which we wrote from scratch according to the specification).
On real (x86) hardware coreboot (www.coreboot.org) is a better match.
It supports everything from special designs to "standard" systems: Linux, some custom loader, a pcbios implementation, or UEFI (or even OpenBIOS, if you so desire) running after hardware initialization, you're free to decide what to use.
The main problem is that we struggle to keep up with all the new chipsets and CPUs.
That's 11 countries of geographic Europe, which covers 46 countries, so that's not "about half", but "less than a quarter".
Taking only the EU countries into account, your list of 11 shrinks to 5 (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Switzerland, Norway, and Serbia aren't part of the EU), while there are 27 EU countries (one of them, Cyprus, outside geographic Europe). That's less than a fifth.
And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
