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Stewart currently works for IBM in the Linux Technology Center on OPAL, the OpenPOWER Abstraction Layer – open source firmware for POWER systems. He currently finds it weird when you don’t have the source code to your firmware and doubly weird that you may not be running a daily build.
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This is something we've considered looking into. However it's currently a tiny fraction of total boot time we'd save if we halved that boot time, and the investment to do that is quite high as we'd need a way to sign, verify, and measure the squashfs image for secure and trusted boot.
So our next batch of efforts are going to be on other firmware components :)
It's a lot more affordable to obtain than it has been in the past though with the Raptor Blackbird system - a microATX board that can be bought with a 4 core CPU for $1200.
Perhaps other hardware vendors should follow our lead and respect freedom :)