# 03 November 2021 - coreboot Leadership meeting minutes

Edited for clarity and formatting.

* Attendees: Christian Walter, David Hendricks, Felix Held, Felix Singer, Jason 
Glenesk, Jay Talbott, Martin Roth, Matt DeVillier, Patrick Georgi, Piotr Król, 
Ron Minnich, Sean Rhodes, Stefan Reinauer, Tim Crawford, Werner Zeh


## Ongoing Items

  * New videoconferencing system?
 
  The desire for a new way of having meeting is because the current Google Meet 
platform requires a Google Employee to allow access.
  It would also be nice to use an open platform instead of a proprietary one, 
but we need something stable that we can all access.
 
   * BigBlueButton was used for the last coreboot EFI working group meeting and 
worked relatively well for most people, though some still seemed to have issues.
     * Matt - BBB did a poor job of filtering background noise.  Not as good 
from an audio perspective.
     * Felix - same.  Audio is much better in meet.
     * We probably do not want to use BBB at this time.
   * Should we try Jitsi?  Limits:  100 ppl is free limit
     * [https://meet.jit.si/](https://meet.jit.si/)
     * Does this work with firefox?  It used to have issues with some browsers.
     * We'll test this for the next EFI working group meeting
   * So far Google Meet seems to offer the best quality.
     * Can we use the Public version of google Meet?
     * 1 hour limit?
     * Number of people?
   * Can coreboot make an Google workspace account and host the meetings with 
Google Meet?
     * Yes, it has a free tier for non-profits.  We'd need to work this out 
with SFC as they're the actual non-profit.

## Agenda:

### [martin] Trademark issues with starlabs.
* StarLabs used the coreboot name in a way that creates confusion.
* What would a reasonable release name be?
  * Starboot
  * Add "Star Labs" prefix before "coreboot" to make clear that it's a distro
  * coreboot version 4.15-company-7 (recommended naming scheme when not doing 
their own distro like libreboot, pureboot, ...)
* We should document acceptable use and naming of the coreboot trademark.
* Should coreboot go back to quarterly releases?
  * [Sean (Star Labs)] Yes, this would help.


### [Martin] 2022 coreboot (only) conference/hackathon/summit

It’s been several years since we had a coreboot summit, and the thought is that 
this would be mostly focused on hacking and discussing improvements to the 
project instead of having a significant number of talks.

* [Chris] Do we need another in person event? OSFF is willing to plan/take over 
costs
  * [Martin]Yes, after looking at the agenda for the latest OSFC, it was felt 
that a coreboot-only conference might be useful. If OSFF wants to pay for it, 
that’d be great, but I don’t think that OSFF should replace coreboot.
  * [Werner] Sounds like a good plan
  * [David] Choose a place with fewer restrictions (needs to be predictable).
* In April after OCP regional summit - OSFF Meetup with hackathon ~40 ppl
  * [Ron] 4-day thing in Prague already planned for the week after OCP. April 
21-24.  Do this in parallel with the OSFF meeting.
  * Martin, Ron, and Chris will meet soon to discuss expanding this meeting.
* [Chris] OSFC 2022 will be (hopefully) in south korea


### [Martin] Use of pseudonyms at coreboot.

We currently require the use of real names at coreboot for legal reasons.  This 
bothers some people.  Could we introduce a method to allow reasonable 
pseudonyms by having a verified name held privately to associate with the name 
used in gerrit?  I’d rather not have everyone switch and end up with code 
checked in as booty-mcbootface, but it seems reasonable to protect people’s 
privacy if desired.

* [Werner] Is there a trust for source code?  Basically a broker who submits 
the patches for people.
  * This is suggesting “Code laundering”.
    * Things like this are just being established now, but maybe shouldn't be 
allowed.
    * The entity submitting code would be responsible for this (this is 
supported by the [Developer’s Certificate of 
Origin](https://coreboot.org/Development_Guidelines#Sign-off_Procedure), part 
(b) or (c))
* [Martin] Can we have a company audit the code?  Then it wouldn't matter as 
much if someone anonymously submitted code because troublesome code could be 
caught.
* The coreboot server is in Germany, so the codebase is following their laws.
* It might be best not to have a policy because then if there are issues, 
lawyers could actually come after us for the policy not being sufficient.
  * What does Linux do?
    * They have the linux foundation and with ~70% (estimate drawn from thin 
air) of big IT corporations being members, they play by different rules.
  * What do other projects do?
  * Let’s ask the SFC.
* The important thing is to make sure that we’re making an effort to keep 
questionable content out.

### U&EFI - Usable & Effective Firmware Initiative.  Created to create 
standards that coreboot can use.
This originated because of the rumor that linux will soon require EFI 
interfaces to boot, a few patches that tried to change core coreboot concepts 
into something different (e.g. 
[https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/51770](https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/51770)),
 and more pushes in a similar direction (such as the “universal” “scalable” 
firmware “standard” driven by Intel). This seems like it’s boxing coreboot into 
a corner.  Additionally there have been efforts to push EFI blocks further into 
coreboot.
* [David] I think this has more to do with distros and OEMs expecting them for 
their manufacturing and testing purposes, for example 
[https://odm.ubuntu.com/docs/ubuntu-bios-uefi-requirements.pdf](https://odm.ubuntu.com/docs/ubuntu-bios-uefi-requirements.pdf)
* Recently there have been a number of initiatives defining “industry 
standards” that affect coreboot, we’re then told that we need to support these 
“standards”
* This will allow coreboot to define our own de-facto standards of similar 
legitimacy.  These will then allow coreboot to continue with what we’re doing.
* UPF - 
[Usable-Payload-Format](https://github.com/Usable-Effective-Firmware-Initiative/Usable-PayLoad-Format/commit/719c4b6852be7af05dd1d7308ee4c29e63fca4e7):
 Recommendations for providing means to pass information on to the OS and 
payloads.
* Join #uefi in libre.chat, also visit its home (for now) at GitHub: 
[https://github.com/Usable-Effective-Firmware-Initiative](https://github.com/Usable-Effective-Firmware-Initiative)


* Note that this name is tongue-in-cheek though the project itself isn't.
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