The truth is it all depends on what companies think will benefit them in any
given area. It is people like us who convince them of that. What you find is
AMD thinks assisting coreboot will help them win in the server arena. Rightly
so. There are many things you can do with coreboot that make administration
easier. AMD doesn't really care about the freedom bit though beyond it
achieving an advantage.
Intel is the same way. Intel's graphics chipsets are free only because they
have no advantage to lose by opening up the specifications. ATI and NVIDIA
outperform Intel even at the low end. Intel is catching up though. However
it's still nothing to brag about. The Intel advantage with its chipsets is
that companies can better develop for them, operating systems like GNU/Linux
can better take advantage of the hardware, and most importantly offer better
support for it, etc.
The advantage to our hardware (ThinkPenguin) is not necessarily it being able
to out perform every other product on the market. I'm sure our hardware
doesn't in many cases. Its advantage is the hardware works better. In many
cases it outperforms the equivalent in proprietary environments or offers
additional features thanks to the ability of any developer being able to
contribute. It's not having to deal with infections, not having to worry
about that upgrade breaking support for your printer, not having to get hit
every time Microsoft decides to do something really stupid (think of things
like the introduction of “ribbons” in MS Office 2007, or tiles in MS
Windows 8). While in GNU/Linux these stupid things happen too the difference
is it's much more adaptable. Where a company decides to abandon software
(think Oracle with OpenOffice) forks are created (LibreOffice). Think Linux
Mint with Ubuntu (sort of anyway-two projects developed to create an
alternative desktop environment).
