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.
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.
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.
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.
Does this mean that flashrom will no longer be usable? Not even on boards that allow disabling secure boot?