Maybe it is the right time to make all this rage converge into contributions to coreboot [1]. A free working alternative is the only practical way out of this future kind of subjection.
Google has already contributed core for some current Ivy Bridge chipsets. It would be nice if coreboot received more testing and development from a broader audience.
Coreboot is a good thing, but it's going to be hard to succeed without hardware vendor support, and that will be hard to build unless people actually want the product.
I work for a VAR. Our preferred vendor was one of the first to market with motherboards that expressly supported Coreboot. We're supporters of OSS, and so are our customers, so we figured that they'd be popular.
We sold only a handful over about two years. Our competitors didn't seem to have much more success, as our vendor didn't continue the experiment into the following motherboard generations.
The problem is not the availability of a free alternative. Hardware vendors could already simply choose not to implement secure boot - the default policy is a single configurable switch during the build. The problem is that vendors believe they can make more money by selling hardware that meets Microsoft's requirements. Coreboot doesn't do anything to help there.
> Hardware vendors could already simply choose not to implement secure boot
You are right, but if we had an easily installable coreboot we could just ignore whatever comes with the computer and just flash coreboot over the existing firmware.
This is basically what Linux people have been doing with Windows in the past twenty years: see that Windows is preinstalled, boot a CD, overwrite the partition table, install distro. But this was possible because in most cases the distro you chose was ready to be installed on a whatever computer you had; the same cannot be said of coreboot.
> You are right, but if we had an easily installable coreboot we could just ignore whatever comes with the computer and just flash coreboot over the existing firmware.
No, you couldn't. The move to secure boot means that firmware updates are signed, because otherwise you could disable secure boot simply by pushing out a fake firmware update.
Google has already contributed core for some current Ivy Bridge chipsets. It would be nice if coreboot received more testing and development from a broader audience.
[1] http://coreboot.org