level: beginner
Due to legal reasons it’s hard to donate money to the coreboot project. Only recently coreboot joined the Software Freedom Conservancy. This still doesn’t solve all problems for people outside the USA.
Currently, companies like Intel and Google have large teams working on coreboot. But coreboot runs also on a lot of boards, where a developer made the port in their spare time. Also, once coreboot runs on a commercial product, that state is often fixed, and changes to coreboot are not tested on these devices by the manufactures. Currently, this work is done by the community. But with more devices, this gets harder and harder.
Additionally, the coreboot project has to be run professionally, that means, the infrastructure has to be maintained, and marketing has to be done (Web site, social medias, conferences) to attract more developers and users. That’s a lot of work to be done in your spare time.
Therefore, the coreboot project needs to think about, how people doing this work can do it as a day-time job. It needs to be ensured, that these people can live from that work.
As a test and example, before the ECC17 the community is asked to pay the travel costs of active contributors who apply for it.