I never understood what Libreboot does on top of Coreboot. As far as I could tell it's a "distro" of Coreboot that just disables some things and maybe adds a few patches.
All the heavy lifting is done by Coreboot.
All the heavy lifting is done by Coreboot.
- Release engineering and testing. When Libreboot started, upstream coreboot wasn't doing releases at all; now they are, but they're still not suitable for end-users who want to use stable tested software: "Our releases aren’t primarily a vehicle for code that is stable across all boards"[0]. Downstream distributions that test on a specific range of devices (such as Libreboot, mrchromebox.tech, and vendors such as Chromebooks, Purism, System 76, ...) are still important to the ecosystem to provide stable releases. In the words of a coreboot dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997880
- Pre-compiled and tested binaries, because lots of users aren't set up to build their own.
- A distribution of tools for more easily installing them than a sequence of long `flashram` incantations.
- Loads of documentation.
- Pre-configuration of common payloads, such as GRUB or SeaBIOS.
And let's not forget that the Libreboot project does contribute to upstream coreboot.
[0]: https://doc.coreboot.org/releases/checklist.html#purpose-of-...
Hell, you use this for anything; "why make a new album, movie, or book when there are already thousands upon thousands of them? Yours probably isn't any better!"
And if you're going to start talking about copy-rightable works of entertainment, then yes if you write a book based off another book just with 1 extra character (analogous to "install <major distro> and do apt install X") then that book would violate copyright and should not be written. It's the lack of copyright in FOSS that allows all the pointless duplication of effort with all the almost identical linux distros.