To be quite frank the last time I looked into any of it was 2009. I spoke to
the lead developer of the free BIOS project at a conference. My recollection
is likely worse than yours. I might take a look into it in the future. We
would need another big sale or two probably in order to be able to even think
about looking into it again though. At which point we would likely want to
fund the development of a port to one 15.6" laptop which we had a time line
of 6-12 months and could also stock up on. That would then maybe partially
solve the issues.
Ultimately I was told though there is no way the free BIOS project is going
to eliminate all the issues. This doesn't mean it isn't worth pursuing the
elimination of as much non-free code as possible. I think we're going to have
to move away from x86 though in order to product a completely free system.
What I'd like to do is shoot for removing the non-free BIOS and then later
aim higher and go for a 15.6” laptop not based on th x86 architecture. This
later system would better full fill most peoples computing needs than the
netbooks which Richard Stallman is well known for utilizing.
I need to speak to someone at the FSF again and find out exactly what they
are doing in regards to the systems they utilize. I believe they are not
utilizing systems dependent on a non-free BIOS. Whatever combination of
hardware they are using I'm pretty confident it is not something we could
offer at the moment. Even on a small scale it wouldn't sell due to price and
on a larger scale availability. At least not until we reached quantities
which we could go in and manufacture parts and demand more changes from third
parties.
