# Cross-Project Collaboration

Open source firmware has become popular and important over the last several decades and is currently anchored in multiple key applications like industry, automotive, infrastructure and commodity PC systems. coreboot has a long-reaching history in all these applications and has become a vital alternative to proprietary firmware solutions. Since coreboot itself is minimalistic, other open source projects like SeaBIOS and flashrom help complete the overall user experience by providing a well established way to boot into an OS and easily reprogram the firmware on demand.

Open source projects often lack funds and are heavily dependent on volunteer work by enthusiasts. coreboot has made its way over the many years it’s been running and is now able to operate its own paid infrastructure for various services like git, Gerrit and Jenkins, all of them are key factors for a worldwide collaboration and project success. Other small but still important projects do not have such resources and face infrastructure issues more often.

Furthermore, often the same people do work for different open source projects. Therefore, it is important to support such projects where feasible. For instance, sharing the IT infrastructure can leverage quite some synergies as the tasks for different projects are quite similar, e.g. push code to public, review it in Gerrit, let Jenkins do a build and report back to Gerrit or provide a bug tracker platform where users and developers can report bugs and issues. The coreboot project already has servers providing such services and these have a huge amount of headroom to execute such tasks for other projects. Additionally, the developers working on multiple projects are supported as they can do their work with the same mindset while interfacing with common services among different projects. This not only improves cross-project collaboration but also does improve code quality because the developers do not have to switch between different project setups.

Therefore, the coreboot project explicitly encourages collaboration with other open source projects in the firmware domain. Especially the already well established partnership with flashrom, SeaBIOS, and EM100 should continue to be maintained further on. This includes:

- Sharing of the IT infrastructure

- Sharing the critical services like git, Gerrit, Jenkins and the bugtracker

- Sharing of the established communication methods via mailing list, Slack, IRC or Discord

- Sharing web services for web page or wikis and blog posts

If there is interest in a collaboration, please reach out to coreboot@coreboot.org.

The coreboot project is still responsible and in charge of its offered services to partner projects. The technical details of the collaboration will be discussed on a case-by-case basis with affected parties where coreboot project infrastructure maintainers have the lead.

Note that it is expected that everyone using the coreboot services is expected to follow coreboot code-of-conduct policies at all times. In cases where the coreboot CoC is broken by someone working only on other projects in the coreboot infrastructure, the coreboot leadership will work with the leadership of the other project on the issue.