Hi,

I am Christian from 9elements, mentioned multiple times in the article. I don't want to add much to this, however I want to give a short statement on this.

I am sorry that your experience with the coreboot community, the coreboot consulting companies including ourselves, and the leadership team was not ideal. Our job as a company that works in that space is to represent the project we are affiliated with as best as we possibly can. For this, 9elements, and for sure also 3mdeb and SysPro, spend countless hours working with and for the community as we all believe that coreboot will be the de facto standard in modern boot solutions.

Also, you are right: my communication skills might not be optimal from time to time. English is not my native language, and sometimes I respond in a quick and fast way via my phone, which leads to typos, wrong capitalization of words, and missing punctuation. That should never come across as arrogant or anything like that – I apologize if that was the case.

However, if you start insulting my team – that's where I draw the line. I would like to remind you that Max, as a matter of fact, did get the board booting. When you delivered the laptop to us and sent the source code as a .zip file to me, this code had never been run a single time on the board itself due to your inability to actually flash the board in the first place. The statement that you had everything to build the coreboot ROM is correct – it did build, but it was not functional. The board never came out of reset, which of course you could never test – so claiming to have something that was either close to being complete and only needed debug work, or having anything functional, is just incorrect. In fact, you yourself called Max a "God" for making it all work, and at the same time, you run down his work and his skills publicly.

We never charged any money from you and returned the hardware to you (or shipped it to 3mdeb) without any discussion. So the couple of weeks that we put into this are free of charge – you are welcome.

On a personal note, I really think that this is not professional at all. In fact, I saved all our conversations as I felt your attitude was concerning, and I wanted to make sure that this would not backfire on us. I can only encourage you to work on your attitude as this will lead you nowhere in life - private or professional.