Technology

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.

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.

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:

He finally built the coreboot ROM with our code, flashed it, and tried to boot the laptop, which displayed an FSP message. Max said he was surprised it made it that far. Why? We told them our code just needed debugging, but they didn’t want to believe it.

Why does the author expect it not to have problems? I know from experience that you can hand over your best, most thoroughly tested code to someone else and they'll immediately find a problem you have never seen. How professional are these people if that surprises them? "But it just needs debugging!" is not the response of someone who knows what they're doing and just needs a second pair of eyes on the code.

In the end this blog post backfires. They paint themselves as an arrogant and problematic client to deal with.

Edit: After reading the links in another comment on this thread (sorry for the instance-specific link, will fix if someone can advise me on a better syntax), and in this reddit thread this is evidently only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Malibal's behaviour. Definitely a company to avoid.

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.

Jeez as someone who's done a lot of contracting/consulting work I can hear this guy in a LOT of prior clients.

You know, the ones that would get F-U pricing or fired shortly after starting work and more often than not end up in court over me not getting paid.

They don't present a sane, rational, normal, competent, functional business aura so much as a whiny petulant little child that wants it all nooooow, and doesn't get that hiring someone means you get some of their time, not 80 hour weeks until your "just debugging" is done.

Also it's never just debugging, because if it was a developer who COULD do it building it, then it's a developer who is good enough to debug it too. If they can't debug it, then they almost certainly don't have the skills to actually do the project in the first place but I digress.

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.

So they're just Clevo reseller?

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

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.

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.