Clevo reseller wants get coreboot ported, ends up throwing a temper tantrum and banning Germany, Texas and AMD over unsatisfactory experience

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨fl42v@lemmy.ml⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.malibal.com/features/dont-support-the-coreboot-project

While the whole exchange must’ve sucked for them, I’ve found their reaction extremely amusing at times, especially the carpet banning for life of everyone within a country/state to the offending party. But hey, that’ll definitely show AMD how to hire those coreboot developers

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JWBananas@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

We originally reached out to 9Elements last year along with several other coreboot consultants, but all of their prices were so outrageous ($50k-$100K per board) that we decided to try porting our laptops ourselves. After hitting a sticking point, we reluctantly contacted them again for help debugging our code.

From the start, our interactions with Christian Walter were awful. We repeatedly stressed how important and time-sensitive this project was, but he seemed completely indifferent. In fact, he made a snide remark about us coming back after trying to do it ourselves.

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.

Sometimes people take their vehicle to mechanics and don’t like the quotes for the repair costs. Some of those people then choose to try to do the work at home. Sometimes one of those people will then reluctantly take the car back to the mechanic after they screw up the work.

And then they balk, because they discover that (A) the mechanic will outright refuse to work on the vehicle due to it being in a dismantled state, or (B) the mechanic will give an even higher quote since they now have to diagnose and clean up the mistakes too.

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Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Based on everything we learned about coreboot, we think you can port a laptop board in 40 hours or less. There are tools that you can use to dump most of the code you need. For instance, the GPIO can be done in 30 minutes, as opposed to the 30-50 hours that was quoted by several developers.

OK, so why didn’t you just port it yourself in 40 hours? Apparently it’s super easy.

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floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
They complain about unprofessional communications then fill this article with whining like this:

Weeks elapsed with little to no activity, because they were super busy pretending to be doing something else out in the abyss of phantom world.

And they never seem to consider that maybe their own code wasn’t as great as they thought. If they can’t “just debug” it themselves, maybe there’s a difficult problem with it?

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- fl42v@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  They paint themselves as an arrogant and problematic client to deal with.
  
  Huh, apparently they sometimes behave like that with customers as well: lemmy.ml/comment/14451901
  
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SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I feel dumber having read that.

Banning a whole country because you disliked a company?

Dealing with stuff that’s ‘almost working’ is often harder than starting from scratch; ask any tradesperson.

They also apparently cannot get their heads around the fact that people might give you a discount if you advertise their brand. Ad-supported pricing has been around for a long time; it’s not some voodoo.

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- ChicoSuave@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  To add: “almost working” is still “not working” but with extra hope. There’s no easy solution for “almost working” because if there was, the people would have made that easy fix to get it working. No, “almost working” is code for “we fucked around with it a lot and don’t know how to get it working or how to start over.”
  
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noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
so… no shipping to two countries and one big-ass state, and no AMD in their device anymore? they sure now how to make their devices easier to sell, lmao.

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- TheBakedPotato@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Ahhh. Not just one state anymore. The principal developer from System76 got Colorado banned now as well. Lol
  
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- gex@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  According to their TOS the state of California is also banned, and you can’t use their website using Google or Apple hardware, Web browsers or email accounts
  
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pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
So they’re just Clevo reseller?

The sure made it sound they’re way more than that.

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- fl42v@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Well, at least they used to be a while back: l.opnxng.com/r/…/general_consensus_on_malibal/
  
  Just tried to find teardowns of more recent laptops of theirs to see if it’s still the case, rather unsuccessfully. Although, I’ve found a few more reviews (in addition to those in the comments):
  
  l.opnxng.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/…/malibal/
  
  l.opnxng.com/r/…/stay_away_from_malibal/
  
  Soo, now I’m even more skeptical of their statement that their communications to those developers were nothing but polite
  
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  - orclev@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Holy shit what a nut job. Reading the comments the real gold is apparently their terms of service. They’ve got a giant laundry list of things that will get you banned including using Chrome or having a gmail email address.
    
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  - pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Just who the fuck do they think they are?
    
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conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
lol at blacklisting AMD because one of their 25k employees politely decided you weren’t worth contracting with after you very probably went raving jackass on them.

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hddsx@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Do they expect someone to work at cost for them? Running a company has overhead.

It sounds like they know what the code should do generally, but either didn’t design it to be debuggable or have no idea what they are doing.

Everyone has their own way of doing things and when you commit you need to make sure you deliver a quality product.

Bug hunting sucks, especially with other people’s design.

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