GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot | Hacker News Reader

GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

libreboot.org

295 pointscodingcoyote201 comments

Obviously we don't have the full context of prior communication, but the message screenshot is super passive aggressive ("just a little reminder you're not a maintainer" when obviously both parties are aware, "you're welcome to send us patches that we will review if we want to" very implying that the patches might just be ignored). It's possible the libreboot author also wasn't communicating professionally either, but I don't think that really warrants a response like that either. If you actually want to convince someone to cease doing something, it seems better to just to stick to cold, formal language; writing something like this makes it seem more like an attempt to rile someone up rather than an attempt at legal enforcement.

A maintainer shouldn't be directly sending a C&D, they'd likely have their lawyers do it.

GNU will probably back pedal

Actually, it is likely the libreboot person is in the wrong, she has been involved in a lot of drama

But this isn't really a C&D letter. It's just a request to stop using their name. Feels like Rowe is assigning it the C&D label, probably since it makes things sound more dramatic, when it really isn't.

The fact that the person who sent the C&D email allegedly tried to "take over" the Libreboot name (according to TFA) is also not a good look.

I found this: https://libreboot.at

> Who are we? Denis ‘GNUtoo’ Carikli and Adrien ‘neox’ Bourmault. We created this and maintain it.

> take a stand for fully free software is to change URLs across the web from <libreboot.org> to <libreboot.at>, and to let people know that no other version of Libreboot is reliably free software

I'm not up to date on these events yet, but GNUtoo is a Guix contributor I see around a fair bit on the mailing list and IRC, which makes this seem more interesting. It's not just a random person who got mad about stuff, but someone very involved in other official GNU stuff. Not familiar with neox, but wouldn't surprise me if they're similarly involved in free software stuff elsewhere.

I don't understand the frackas about a library that reboots your computer being free or not....

I read it that way too.

Lib reboot.

Always have, but it took LibreOffice becoming mainstream to make the correction mostly unnoticeable.

My favorite is the GNU libiberty library, which is picked up when you pass the -liberty option to gcc. :D

I hadn't heard about this drama before, but as I can piece things together, Leah has been maintaining Libreboot and another boot system for years. Denis and Adrien disagreed with Leah's decision to include binaries, created their own version of Libreboot without those binaries and published it under the same name on a very similar domain trying to claim the existing Libreboot name for their version.

Then I suspect Leah disagreed with that fork both on technical merits (it's based on old code) and with the stealing of the name, but she agreed with the need for a version without the binaries, so she made that and published it under the name GNUboot, intended for Denis and Adrien to base their work on, and now Denis and Adrien are complaining that she's misusing the GNU name.

Is that roughly a correct summary?

Because if it is, it sounds to me like both sides do have valid points, but handled the disagreement very poorly. Denis and Adrien complaining that Leah stole the GNU name when they just stole the Libreboot name, sounds very hypocritical. The whole thing would be a lot better if both sides stopped the drama and powergames and just worked together to create the best possible boot systems; one with the binaries and one without.

I often wonder if someone is whispering in people's ears, to destroy such projects.

For example, a long email history on any of these people(and even if you don't use, people you email do use gmail), from a central store such as gmail, would provide immense insight into personality traits, etc.

Which means external motivaters could be used as handy leavers to drive dissent.

Little spats like this, erode project trust, and just divert energy.

Anyhow, no idea if this is happening. I guess if you really do want to destroy something, just let Oracle buy it, so maybe I'm off here.

Most FOSS projects are unpaid, and the only reward is nerd-fame. That's why maintainers are often petty about credits and "ownership".

Seems like a faster route to destruction would be letting Elon buy it.

But yeah, this does seem to happen painfully often. The particulars of this specific incident remind me a lot of the FFmpeg vs LibAV split (or the LibAV+Debian vs. FFmpeg+Everyone Else split).

I have to remind myself not to read too much into such things, for three reasons that we all know, but which may bear repeating to ourselves:

1. Open source is global, and not everyone is a native speaker of English.

2. Among English speakers, not everyone has the same cultural conventions and nuances. Even within US cities, you can drive 15 minutes, and find very different conventions. And culture in Boston isn't the same as in the Bay Area, isn't the same as in Bolivia.

3. Even within the same culture, not everyone picks up on signals in language to the same degree (whether perceiving or sending). And some people who think they're picking up on signals are conflating with biases more than some others do.

I say I have to remind myself, because this still hits me. For example, when I'm searching certain bug databases, trying to solve an annoying problem, and some prolific volunteer commenting on a bug report there speaks in a manner that comes off as brusque or dismissive. Where they're from (across the Atlantic from me), maybe it's interpreted as professional or capable, and is even reassuring.

That's an essential point. At the same time the interpretation isn't completely random or unpredictable; we're all humans, with the same emotions, the same physiological expressions of them, and the same internal responses to others' emotions. If you yell at someone anywhere, you can expect a certain range of emotional responses.

Anecdotal counterpoint about "yelling". I was having a conversation with my mother at a Cafe. After 15mins the lady next to us, very genuinely and nicely, asked if we were ok because we were yelling at each other. We're Italian. That was our normal conversation!

Someone's definition of aggressive discourse is definitely not everyone's.

That's why "Sir, please don't raise your voice" is so condescending and just a way to make it look like the other party is escalating.

It's not just a way to do that. There's no point imputing a motivation you made up to the other person. It's doing exactly what you're saying they're guilty of: assuming.

I get what they’re saying though. It often has an accompanying tone that’s borderline meme-like. It’s this thing we say the moment somebody takes a tone we take any issue with - or we think we can publicly proclaim we take issue with to get those around us on our side. I think many of us were guilty of this at least once and would acknowledge it if we really sat back and thought about it.

The number of times I’ve seen people having a discussion with somebody online and they respond with “bro, calm down“ when the person has used no caps lock, no exclamation points, no particularly vitriolic language, is staggering and incredibly irritating.

The obvious solution to this: spend less time reading pointless online arguments, and go outside and touch grass.

to keep in line with the topic of communication styles and assumptions, this reads (to me) like a long version "bro, calm down" :).

I’m not quite sure why what I said warranted such an incredibly rude response.

Unfortunately words may be interpreted differently to how they are intended. My apologies if you took offence, as that wasn't my intention. I do often make snarky remarks on here but this wasn't meant to be one of them.

I think this is part of what I'm getting at, text conversations are missing eye contact, body language cues etc, and along with the anonymity of the internet, a lot of things can be misinterpeted and disagreements can escalate quickly.

I normally try not to engage in it too much - when the sun is shining and it's a beautiful day I'd rather be out exercising and patting peoples dogs than engaging in Internet drama. That is all.

Yep. The reason a lot of people do it is not to de-escalate. Quite the opposite. It's to give the appearance of de-escalation to outsiders while at the same time escalating the argument by using a fallacy to attempt to irritate the other person.

My mom’s side of the family is descendent from Italians. Sunday barbecues were always full of yelling, shouting and cursing at each other.

I miss those times. By the end of the day, everybody would hug and kiss and say goodbye until next Sunday.

Yes, a good example. That's what I meant by a "range of emotional responses" (emphasis added).

Also, our interpretation depends on context, such as in your example, and many other things. It's a bit argumentative to treat a short HN comment as a roadmap of every human interaction and find flaws.

You know, sometimes it's very hard to judge.

I'm of xUSSR descent, and sometimes when I see a group of chinese colleagues speaking together loudly, it is very weird to me, as soometimes they are so loud that if it was in Russian it would mean that the brawl could start any second. It is hard to judge sometimes.

Even in written communication it is was told to me many times that many Russians, especially those with B1/B2 levels, as well as Jewish people are extremely direct, and it may be perceived as native speakers as rude, although it isn't meant to.

That expectation of sameness is exactly the problem.

We don't all express ourselves or react in the same ways, despite whatever our HR training videos claim.

When someone "yells at me," I tend to think they're excited and it piques my interest in what they're saying. At the same time, they're excited so I expect them to omit some details and not give me a complete picture - I'm less discerning about the details. Was that one of the responses I'm supposed to feel?

> We don't all express ourselves or react in the same ways

I didn't say we did. I said there is a range of responses we can reasonably expect.

> some prolific volunteer commenting on a bug report there speaks in a manner that comes off as brusque or dismissive

Maybe they are being brusque and dismissive. Maybe they're allowed to. I know I use a somewhat different tone when I'm filing bugs against a project I've been submitting bug reports and patches to for ten years, run by a developer who I've known personally for 20 ;-)

I've had to referee disagreements between East Coast USians and Germans a few times before now, mostly in terms of acting as a protocol translation layer until they were both sufficiently calmed down to underail themselves and focus on the technical side again rather than being distracted by their differing communication styles.

Generally once I'd helped them unpick that they collaborated happily and came up with something good that they both liked, it's just once people are locked in to talking past each other it's often non-trivial to break out of that.

It would be interesting to read more about this. You should start a blog :)

I can highly recommend https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/ on the topic of cultural communication styles.

> I did this release for them

Did I miss something? Over the past 7 years the Libreboot project has been extremely aggressive towards the FSF. Going so far as to say the GNU project shouldn't exist and throwing insults at individuals in the organization.

The emphasis on the whole, "I did this release for them" honestly doesn't pass the sniff test and kind of feels like they're intentionally trying to create drama. The "why didn't they contact me" has a completely obvious answer based on past interactions.

So here's a better question, why didn't Libreboot contact GNU before trying to publish their own GNU Boot release? Why did they try to impersonate them?

No. The better question is, why didn't FSF contact Leah before trying to publish their own Libreboot releases at libreboot.at? Why did they try to impersonate Libreboot?

Whatever you may think of Leah publishing an unofficial GNU Boot release for them to rebase off of, she didn't try to impersonate them by buying a confusingly similar domain.

Compare her single reference to an "unofficial GNUBoot release" to this: https://libreboot.at/

> No. The better question is, why didn't FSF contact Leah before trying to publish their own Libreboot releases at libreboot.at? Why did they try to impersonate Libreboot?

That's not a better question at all. They list out their explicit reasoning for their attempted name takeover. I definitely don't agree with it, but I have no reason to believe that they're lying about their own beliefs.

I absolutely do have reason to doubt Leah's words of releasing GNU Boot as being in good faith though. Their history of drama with them is the reason for my doubt.

In terms of practicality, I feel like a better reaction would have been to either trademark their project name or maintain a separate fork of Libreboot that would include the binary blobs. Why resort to trademark infringement?

I was completely unaware of this, and yet they collaborate with each other? Do you have potential sources for this?

> and yet they collaborate with each other?

Libreboot use to be part of the GNU project, but I'm not aware of any collaboration after the fact. I just know the primary author/maintainer of Libreboot had a falling out with the FSF and GNU project. I don't think they ever reconciled (and I'm not sure they will at this point).

As for the cause of their falling out, this happened around 2016 when the FSF let go of a transgender employee. It appears the original statements by the Libreboot maintainer was deleted off of their site, but they are archived[0][1] and the original email sent out declaring themselves no longer part of the GNU project[2]

Just to be clear, I am not sure if an actual reason was given out for why they were fired. The FSF had declined giving an actual reason, and Richard Stallman himself stated "The dismissal of the staff person was not because of her gender. Her gender now is the same as it was when we hired her. It was not an issue then, and it is not an issue now."[3]

Those articles and emails are the only primary sources that I'm aware of. There might be more information somewhere else, but unfortunately I don't really know of anything further.

There was more drama later on. Something about the author leaving the project and then forcibly taking it back a few years later down the line against other contributor's wishes. But I think the reason for that was a bit more nuanced and I didn't keep up with that. I'm not even sure it had anything to do with the FSF or GNU project anyways.

[0] https://archive.is/T8BBA

[1] https://archive.is/q5uod

[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg0003...

[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg0005...

I see, it sound indeed a bit more nuanced than just drama.

Thanks for sharing!

Completely pointless drama, but there is a real issue here in that people (phoronix) mistook the unofficial one for the real one (https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Boot-20230717). This is their way of interjecting.

This is the piece of this story most people commenting here are missing.

I wish this were higher up. I can see why the situation is very confusing to somebody who doesn't know this.

This is kind of the fault of phoronix, as Leah's release was always marked as unofficial.

It's still a trademark problem if I go around calling my site Unofficial Facebook.

I'm struggling to see how there's an argument either party are in the right here for trying to squat on each other's names.

This highlights why trademarks exist, to avoid confusion. I don't know the history of the project but once somebody starts calling some software Libreboot anybody else should stay clear of that name.

I'm still not sure I understand it correctly.

So we have Libreboot (pronounce 'LibreBoot'), and we have an unofficial GNU Boot (pronounce 'NewBoot') both by Leah Rowe (from UK, good coder, also a drama magnet). With the unofficial GNU Boot being more up to par with Libreboot, and being 'completely FOSS' whereas the other one made concessions.

Then we have Coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) on which Libreboot is based, and we have an unofficial Libreboot, and an official GNU Boot. What is the purpose of the unofficial Libreboot and official GNU Boot? They're both lagging behind the other versions by Leah Rowe. I'm all for forks but why do we have these people who seemingly unable to collaborate with each other, and then create all this drama?

I used LinuxBIOS once. On an old ThinkPad T61. I replaced the proprietary BIOS with LinuxBIOS, and my goodness it was fast compared to the slow, proprietary BIOS. But it was also risky to replace the BIOS if I didn't want to physically touch the device, fiddling with soldering and the like. So for too long, I did not dare to.

Which is why Leah offers this service to other people: second hand, physically clean and proprietary firmware stripped devices. Old devices. Which require various microcode fixes but once these are active (and an up-to-date Linux distribution takes care of that) they should be secure.

In the end I brought my ThinkPad T61 to the dump. The battery and backup battery were both dead, the SSD was dying, the case was a bit damaged and some screws were missing, and I couldn't bother to update the slow machine. That I could've sold it or have someone patch it up and resell it didn't tilt in my mind. I was relocating and needed to get rid of a lot of stuff so it is hindsight 20/20 that would've been the best option.

GNU Boot seems to have sent it not for anything in Libreboot itself, but to adress a web page with self-proclaimed “unofficial” GNU Boot releases. They wanted it to stop proclaiming to be “unofficial GNU Boot” releases. Understandable, if a bit antagonistic.

EDIT: Courtesy of user jbit¹, this is the aforementioned web page:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot...>

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36927233>

How can they object to "unofficial" releases of Free (tm) software when anyone can pull the code and build it.

Because trademarks still exist. But yeah, IDK why a true free (as in culture) software advocate would care.

Because they'll get the bug reports. It's very annoying having a bunch of "unofficial" releases floating around for a project one maintains.

it's not even the same code

Well, it is GNU Boot code but rebased from newer versions of Libreboot.

GNU Boot seems to be Libreboot with very minor differences (mainly documentation) + removal of binary blobs.

Check https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/libreboot-devel/2023-0... and https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/libreboot-devel/2023-0... to see the patches.

There is also a Savannah repository but history does seem to have been deleted: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuboot.git

Haha, I can't deny that I love the catty drama that happens around the free software community. While I do wish people would get along better for the health of the project, I also suspect that these strong characters are why the movement hasn't been completedo taken over by corporate interests.

I'm 100% with you on that. Strong free software leadership (e.g. classic Torvalds), despite all its problems, is naturally anti-corporation.

Anyone with a real job in a moderately Big Co. can tell you that.

Is it really though?

Look at the who's who of the Linux foundation and it's all the big tech lackeys deciding everything. Even very questionable companies like Huawei are highly represented. I don't call that anti-corporate.

Cue gratuitous eye roll.

The Linux foundation is not equal to Linux. The entire point of the Linux foundation is to interface with the rest of the world's beuracracies, corporations included. Anyone can be represented by putting in the work and putting up the cash.

Ultimately corporate garbage rarely leaks into the kernel proper. Most of the filth is off in driver land, which isn't even that bad given it's always going to be a vendor landfill.

Yup, exactly the point. Corporate garbage not making it into the kernel is solely the outcome of Torvalds-like style of saying "this is garbage and you're an *diot", where it's very rare that any processes or governance bodies would do anything about it.

To non-americans, all the companies in the linux foundation are as questionable as huawei.

Exactly. But we're on a US site where shitting on anything China is almost a guaranteed karma boost. Some posts are literally impossible to downvote.

>Even very questionable companies like Huawei

That is an extremely Americanized take on that awful member list. Is Intel's history of being anticompetitive better? How about their presence in Israel? Is Meta better? Microsoft?

To a non-American, many (most) of those companies are worse than Huawei. Actually, any company who share user data with the government (as shown by Snowden) is much worse than Huawei.

> Actually, any company who share user data with the government (as shown by Snowden) is much worse than Huawei.

Implicit bias exposed by trying to remove Huawei from the list of companies that share data with their government, combined with whataboutism trying to distract from the meaning of the comment by focusing on a minor item provided as an example.

Anti-corporate licenses would be the Peer Production License, Anti-Capitalist Software License, etc. whereas GPL/MIT/Apache etc. are all extremely corporate-friendly as can be plainly seen by the companies that have adopted them.

However GPL software being corporate-friendly can be a good thing if it leads to "exvestments" into public goods that create alternatives to corporate software (such as with Linux) in ways that are not direct investments into corporate aims

I was thinking it's part of the reason it never offered a cohesive desktop OS.

Okay, everyone, line up behind KDE and push!

He said cohesive, not 'kohesive'.

KDE is by far the better desktop, Gnome will never be great as long as they abhor choice. The "you're using it wrong" is too strong there.

and yet people love apple

> and yet people love apple

That doesn't minimise the impact of open-source software.

I've yet to see an Apple user who doesn't install brew as a first step before doing anything with their computer.

From what I see, people may love Apple's OS, but they can't use it with without open-source tools.

> I've yet to see an Apple user who doesn't install brew as a first step before doing anything with their computer.

Most Apple users don't even know what brew is, and I'd be willing to bet that most devs using Macs don't install it either.

Anyway, the larger point that gnome can't succeed because it doesn't offer "choice" is nonsense.

I know exactly zero developers that use a Mac without homebrew installed.

I didn't say it can't succeed. Just that KDE is a better (and more powerful) desktop. Gnome obviously suits some people The problem is the people whom it doesn't suit, they can't change anything. They are beholden to the choices made by Gnome's developer team. That will never suit everyone. Of course extensions are a thing but they tend to cause conflicts between them and not be updated to work with newer Gnome versions quickly enough.

I moved away from Apple too for this reason in fact.

People love Apple because it makes very high quality hardware, and its software is generally very reliable. They don't really like that you can't configure things. They just put up with it.

There's a whole industry of little apps that let you fix things about MacOS that doesn't really exist on Windows. Rectangle, Karabiner Elements, SteerMouse, SteerMouse, etc.

Gnome copies the worst things about MacOS.

My macbook had severe cooling problems, which became worse when the fan broke.

Apple are designed to look cool, not to BE cool.

Yes

Because Preview works, KPDF works and Gview behaved weird or in the wrong way most of the time

Apple builds the automatic car by removing the gear shift, Gnome builds it by removing the gas pedal and just having a button called "Go" which makes you go at 10mph

Not my experience. I have a Gnome desktop that maybe a Gnome developer have a hard time to recognize as such. It works as I want and I keep the convenience of being able to Google problems and solutions of a mainstream desktop (KDE being the other one) and not a more or less obscure one.

This means that under the hood, using extensions, you can customize that Gnome car. Can an Apple automatic car do that as easily?

It's good that you can do this, but most people prefer the default experience instead of fiddling with customizations to make it more special. And yes, fiddling and customizing is cool, when you have time.

So between the Apple automatic and Gnome "pick customizations" I know which one I prefer (and yes Apple does have extensions, settings, etc). Yes, there won't be a perfect solution and sometimes you kinda miss some minor thing but it is minor.

For example, looking at: https://extensions.gnome.org/#page=2 there's Date and Time formatter (you can do that in Apple) and "Sound Input & Output Device Chooser" which you can do by going in settings in Apple - but it doesn't matter most of the time because the out of box experience works almost perfectly

I do use Sound Input & Output Device Chooser. Great improvement over the default.

If I'll ever buy a Mac (and I can't imagine why) I'd want to totally change its windows management and make it as close as possible to Gnome 2 and Windows XP, with virtual desktops (Gnome 2 had them.) I would probably disable all gestures except scrolling and zooming.

I'd also shed tears about the lack of physical buttons on the touchpad but that starts to be about the hardware, which is off-topic.

Extensions aren't great though. I tried using Gnome that way for a while but some extensions cause conflicts between one another and in many cases they are not updated in a timely manner when a new gnome version comes out.

In contrast, KDE also supports extensions but I've never needed any because it's so configurable.

> Apple builds the automatic car by removing the gear shift

Which, btw, means that you can never overtake anyone while going up, unless your engine is 2x of the power it'd need with gears.

It means it is an automatic car, not that you're stuck in the same gear

Is this another comment from someone who tried linux for 20 minutes ~30 years ago and since then keeps parroting reddit comments?

I agree on KDE being better but that's just because they consistently put in the effort and results piled up over time.

Sure, with a few setbacks (cue 4.0 nightmares) but overall their technological choices (Qt in primis), architecture and quality of contributors won the battle.

Gnome used to be way more polished at the Gnome 2 vs KDE 3 era but kind of lost its way over time.

It's definitely not about unchangeable defaults vs configuration (there's a market for both).

he didn't say gohesive either. do you want to propose CDE then? i understand it's free software now.

Are you suggesting the corporate interests want that?

I think in fact the corporate interests already get 99% of everything they want and they simply don't care for a cohesive desktop OS.

It's wanted by people who want linux to become mainstream and think forcing everybody to use their personal DE of choice would be a step towards that goal. It's fine though, it's never going to happen because the whole point is that users are free to use what they want how they want. And if somehow that freedom was taken away, mainstream adoption of linux would be a pyrrhic victory anyway.

Incredibly ignorant comment. It won't happen because corporations won't let it. Adobe alone could make Linux Desktop happen tomorrow, but there's nothing in it for them. That's all there is to it.

Bizarre remark. Adobe has no power to unify the Linux desktop. They cannot force me to stop using the DE/WM of my choice. Desktop fragmentation is a natural and desirable consequence of user choice. You seem to be confused as to what this conversation is even about.

Linux already has a cohesive de, it's called emacs!!

> a cohesive desktop OS

What would that look like, then?

> I also suspect that these strong characters are why the movement hasn't been completedo taken over by corporate interests

They already serve 99% of corporate interests. A "takeover" would sacrifice the veil of what the propagandized "open source community" interprets as corporate egalitarianism.

If you make no distinction between free software and open source, sure. But the free software community, centered around fsf, is known to be hard to work with.

Sadly, that difficulty is practically the only difference in the distinction. Each share the same crippling shortcomings: those of capitalism itself.

One can't help but wonder if the corporate interests are actually responsible for creating this drama as an attempt to derail or impede these projects.

It has happened before. But it doesn’t really matter whether that’s what’s happening here, as it doesn’t affect how you need to deal with it.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4031841

LOL!

I doubt it. The libreboot maintainer is just unstable and willing to cause huge amounts of drama whenever possible.

The way I see it is there's office drama just like this, difference is that open source is transparent for everyone to see, and global. It's like a global office that we all get glimpses into.

And in this particular case, it reminds me of Red Hat and CentOS actually. Because one project just wants to ensure that people who download <name brand> are actually getting <name brand> and not something else. That concern is just as valid in open source as it is in big enterprise.

Libreboot is one of those projects I have a tough time following because there’s always some toes they are stepping on. I don’t understand why this project has so many people problems.

Sources to get the reader started?

Seems like the type of project that, originating out of defending against user-hostility or user-negligence, would have some (possibly overly?) passionate people behind it.

Just Google "libreboot drama" and make sure to clear your schedule for the evening.

Wow, it's been a while since I heard so much use of "SJW". I think Leah's actions here seemed defensible. You can easily understand how a trans person would feel uncomfortable being part of or under a project that they find as hostile to their own identity.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2017-01/msg00001...

Friends, not only is there room for two boots in the world, we need that many if we want to get anywhere.

Thank you. I laughed out loud. Also, this is true.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot...

For context, this is the page the cease and desist was referring to.

Why is Libreboot always in the middle of drama? Is the maintainer just that kind of person?

There was the spat of drama in 2016, and the view of "always in the middle of drama" is IMO confirmation bias since then (the financial trouble in 2020, then Leah's return to libreboot in 2021.)

Today's drama is part of larger culture wars going on in the community:

- The pro-RMS vs anti-RMS thing going on since RMS's removal from the FSF in 2019, much amplified by his reinstatement in 2021 (the latter of which lead to most of the FSF staff walking out). Is RMS still fit to lead the FSF? Has the FSF lost its way?

- The thing about whether or not "the FSF's/RMS's RYF and FSDG policies regarding firmware and microcode are misguided and harmful".

libreboot got pulled in to that when in November 2022 it merged osboot, adopting osboot's firmware/microcode policies, which are at odds with the FSF's policies. So then some folks "forked" https://libreboot.org as https://libreboot.at and claim to be the "true" libreboot. I put "forked" in quotes because there wasn't any new libreboot development going on there; it was just a snapshot of the pre-osboot-merge libreboot releases. Then, more recently, the libreboot.at folks decided to resume development of an FSF-friendly coreboot distribution as "GNU Boot".

So yeah, I guess you can say this drama is Leah's fault in that she has taken a clear stance against the FSF's firmware/microcode polices, but so have a lot of other folks in the community.

> The pro-RMS vs anti-RMS thing going on since RMS's removal from the FSF in 2019

it's been going on MUCH longer than that.

No matter what he's done for free software, he's also a super-creep based on some of his comments

I mean, yes, but it was brought to a crest then. It went from a bunch of folks in the community separately saying "yeah, he's kinda problematic..." to a bunch of folks standing together and saying "he's problematic!"

So of course it had been going on a while if more than 3000 people were "suddenly" willing to sign the open letter against him.

3000 people "stand up". The other 1000,000 are flagged. Nice brigading going on here.

I suspect the culture wars are largely a psyop by corporate interests who perceive the FSF and other user-freedom advocacy groups as obstructions to their attempts at controlling the population.

The FSF lost its way at least 10 years ago, though probably longer. The whole tech landscape has shifted while they still focus on the distinction between firmware stored on a wifi card nand vs being loaded on initialisation. No one but RMS can work out how this makes a difference.

Their non budging stance on issues that hardly make sense or are logically inconsistent, meanwhile society is rapidly shifting to a constant mandatory surveillance state.

At this point the FSF is just a Richard Stallman fan club. So kicking him out would scrap their last bit of relevance.

Leah Rowe. Yes. There is always some kind of drama surrounding her, most of it started by her.

People who are not satisfied with themselves are often also not satisfied with others

- personal experience as a dramanaut

Libreboot is such an unfortunate name, as you could also read the name as a library dedicated to rebooting a computer.

I didn't downvote you by the way, was someone else. I am in holiday in Spain and surrounded by the use of the word Libre regarding libraries and books. So the same thought as your own also crossed my mind.

> the word Libre regarding libraries and books

That's not really "libre", but either libro (book) or librería (bookshop).

You may see libre on parkings [0].

[0] https://www.burguet.es/fotos/cartel_vinilo_retroiluminado.jp...

Thank you

I think they were going for "lib reboot" like "lib c" or "lib x11"

It made perfect sense at the time it started.

Hell, even the OpenOffice fork was called LibreOffice.

You could certainly read "libreboot" as "LibReboot" when the project started.

Trademarks need to be actively defended. Even if they liked the project, the owners need to show that they made an effort to protect their mark. This is a nothingburger.

But nothing has happened yet other than a “stop it” email! I flagged this because the screenshot shown in the article is not a “cease and desist” letter. Nothing here is interesting.

Functional code is better than non-functional code. What good is libreboot if you can't use it? You're more than welcome to use the now-maintained notgnuboot.vimuser.org or libreboot censored if you hate binary blobs, and are also more than welcome to try to find hardware that doesn't have closed source blobs built in.

I love free software, and will never stop, but "Libre" is only great in a vacuum.

> Functional code is better than non-functional code. What good is libreboot if you can't use it?

Some people believe that the absence of antifeatures is more important than the presence of features. That's... honestly one of GNU's big controversial ideas, for decades now.

I have come around on the driver blob issue a bit in recent years. Something using software blobs can be RE'd and become fully free someday, but is not FSF-approved until it is. Burn the same blobs into the hardware where they can't be changed and the FSF approves because "it's as good as it can get", however they're really about equal levels of freedom, and the software one can become better later on, so it starts to seem silly. I don't want to imply people should stop fighting the fight, more like grabbing some of the FSF-approved hardware feels like giving up on the fight actually.

Saying this as someone who has replaced and removed WLAN cards in laptops that need blobs, and used FSF-approved distros long-term.

Somewhat related, I think the Apple Silicon MacBooks will end up replacing many people's old ThinkPads someday thanks to the work from the Asahi team. (A bit early right now, especially if you have one newer than an M1.)

> Somewhat related, I think the Apple Silicon MacBooks will end up replacing many people's old ThinkPads someday thanks to the work from the Asahi team. (A bit early right now, especially if you have one newer than an M1.)

That sounds a bit weird to me: reading Asahi blog posts, it sounds like Asahi are doing little hardware drivers, rather a lot of RPCs, because most hardware features are behind some other CPU running proprietary firmware. (Loaded by bootloader stages before Asahi if I followed correctly)

Libreboot/Coreboot/etc are themselves projects which try to replace what many would consider a "binary blob" with open source code.

It's not surprising that the inclusion of (smaller) binary blobs in those projects is an issue which elicits strong feelings both ways since it goes to the core of the projects' purposes.

This guy made a video about this. https://youtu.be/vMolA5H39IE

A pretty good summary, too.

I mean, first of all, that was not an actual cease-and-desist letter. It was a fairly gentle reminder that she doesn’t have the right to use their mark. And they were right about that and she was wrong to do it even if she tried to immediately clarify by saying “just kidding it’s unofficial.”

Also, with “supporters” like her, who needs enemies?

But hey, as an outsider, I enjoy watching the petty mudslinging back and forth, so carry on, folks.

There were some harassment threads popping up over the last couple months, both on /g/ and /pol/ where the chans started to doxx her again.

So I would be careful in reading into this. Of course no evidence because by the time it appears here, most threads and comments have been deleted already and the desuarchive-like websites almost never contain all comments. That's how 4chan works after all.

My comment:

Leah has been very helpful when I started to debug my old T440p at the time, both in regards to disassembly, flashing, debugging and pointing me in the right direction.

There are some snarky comments down here which seem to be from chans, and they seem to imply that Leah never shipped her libreboot flashed Thinkpads (implying fraud), which AFAIK didn't happen. There were too many orders at some point for a single person to handle, and she caught up with those later; and communicated that clearly.

Leah, if you are reading this: Don't feed the trolls, they gonna get bored if you ghost them. Treat them like the 5 year olds that they behave like, and don't read too much into this shitstorm. I'm very thankful for your very appreciated work!

Sure are an unfortunate number of trolls here.

Edit: I just love finding that communities I participate in have a non-negligible amount of bigotry that goes completely unchallenged and unmoderated.

In fact I would not be surprised at this point if moderation somehow found me in violation of the rules. God forbid anyone try to defend marginalized groups. Like that’s some affront to free speech or an inherent dog whistle to my “fellow SJW’s”.

You want people to look away because it might be baseless accusations based on your baseless accusations? I never go to such crap places as *chan, but I have seen enough Leah drama to know it is absolutely possible the blame is at least 50/50.

How about you do better than what you complain about and add proof? So far the only comment I have seen here that looks like throwing baseless accusations is yours.

> You want people to look away because it might be baseless accusations based on your baseless accusations? I never go to such crap places as *chan, but I have seen enough Leah drama to know it is absolutely possible the blame is at least 50/50.

> How about you do better than what you complain about and add proof? So far the only comment I have seen here that looks like throwing baseless accusations is yours.

Where does all the sudden hostility towards me come from?

Regarding proof: Just go to desuarchive and search for "tranny"+"libreboot" and you'll find a couple of threads.

I thought libreboot applied to rejoin GNU project long time ago. I remember reading it on /r/reddit. What happened afterwards?

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66tpiy/proposal_for_...

When I hear Libre... I expect the project to not include any blobs without code. That I can change or build all myself

In that sense I think libreboot should rename to something else since they decided now to include blobs, for whatever good reason that was

We need to keep projects that continues to push for fully open hardware

Why is there so much drama around libreboot? I would prefer the software responsible for booting my machine to be trustworthy and boring, all this drama certainly doesn’t make it so. Perhaps more resources should be spent on supporting hardware newer than ~10 years instead of infighting?

While their complaints are legitimate, it seems to go against the spirit of the GNU Boot project.

Isn't Leah the person that sold ThinkPads on behalf of Libreboot, didn't send it, then put the blame on her mental issues?

Then she abandoned the project and let the contributors take over, after some time she booted them with fake accusations, banned them from their IRC channel and took over the project. The contributors complained that she didn't even have the decency of contacting them, but she was adamant of taking the Libreboot name for her again to sell used Laptops. This was also the moment that she began to add binary blobs to Libreboot.

They founded the GNU Boot project and she, not satisfied, created another "GNU Boot" just to say that their project is "inferior" and now she complains about a "cease and desist" of a person that rightfully don't like her.

EDIT: LukeShu corrected me below. I just said here what I remembered. Upvote him.

I don't know about past actions. But my understanding is she didn't create "another GNU Boot," she made a GNU Boot release of Libreboot to allow them to rebase their fork off something that wasn't from 2021.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying the C&D was wrong. Trademarks must be actively defended and I'm not offended that they did so. I just remain unconvinced that Leah Rowe was trying to create another GNU Boot project.

This is highly personal, and it is pretty sad that the GNU project name is being involved in this drama that doesn't have much to do with them.

They (GNU Boot) don't want her help, and I understand why they don't like her. The fact she is making more drama from it is more proof that she is not trustworthy.

EDIT: I was wrong

> They (GNU Boot) don't want her help, and I understand why they don't like her. The fact she is making more drama from it is more proof that she is not trustworthy.

Everyone is still free to fork GNU Boot, even if the maintainers don't "want help". Also Leah seems to be the upstream maintainer. Reusing the name for a fork is of course not the best thing to do, but it was promptly changed when requested.

And publishing a C&D is not really making drama. Transparency is important.

EDIT: Also have to point out that the sender of the C&D wasn't among those expelled from Libreboot in 2021, they merely object to the inclusion of binary blobs, as per http://libreboot.at , so there isn't "personal drama" in this.

> it is pretty sad that the GNU project name is being involved in this drama

Extra sad since Leah was one of the few high-profile people willing to publicly defend RMS, a position I really respected: https://web.archive.org/web/20210826050949/https://libreboot...

And I can't blame her for not feeling that way any more:

  [lammy@emi] curl -I https://libreboot.org/news/rms.html
  HTTP/2 301 
  date: Sun, 30 Jul 2023 04:04:13 GMT
  location: https://libreboot.org/news/gnuboot.html

If you look at the web page in question:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot...>

then you might agree that GNU Boot may have a point that the web page is (or was) using the name “GNU Boot” confusingly. Accordingly, they asked it to be changed, albeit somewhat confrontationally and brusquely.

I'd like to read more about this, but I will say that https://libreboot.org/news/policy.html is right on the merits.

Wow that was a great read, thank you

That doesn't seem to be factual.

The people involved in Libreboot.at / GNU Boot are Adrien Bourmault and Denis Carikli, and the whole Libreboot.at / GNU Boot forks started in 2023.

They don't seem to be the people that were booted in 2021, which are Andrew Robbins and Sebastian Grzywna – http://andrewrobbins.info/libreboot.html

Unless Leah managed to abandon the project in 2021-2022, give it to Adrien/Denis to maintain and then made another (a third!) alleged coup, I don't see how all of this can be related.

Once again, I have no horse on this race and never heard of those people before, but I'm replying to you again because you're the one making those accusations, which I assume are either an honest mistake from you, or you're talking about things that were never published anywhere.

Your context is important and I said what I remembered that happened in that time. LukeShu also corrected my comment more extensively.

> Isn't Leah the person that sold ThinkPads on behalf of Libreboot

No: She sold librebooted laptops under the brand "gluglug" and later "minifree". This was never "on behalf of Libreboot"; it was always separate.

> didn't send it, then put the blame on her mental issues?

Yes, mostly: in 2020 minifree accumulated a backlog of orders that she wasn't able to fulfill. However, AFAIK, she did eventually ship all those orders, and minifree is in a good place today.

> Then she abandoned the project and let the contributors take over

Sorta: She had removed herself as a Libreboot maintainer after the 2016 drama between her and the FSF. She had already long not been a Libreboot maintainer by the time she encountered trouble in 2020.

> after some time she booted them with fake accusations, banned them from their IRC channel and took over the project. The contributors complained that she didn't even have the decency of contacting them

Yes: She did forcefully take Libreboot back over in 2021. But, in the 5 years of SwiftGeek et al. being the Libreboot maintainers, they never shipped a release. At the the time she took it back over, the last release was more than 5 years old, shipped by Leah before she stepped away in 2016. So IMO her taking it back over was the right thing, even if how she did it was shitty.

> but she was adamant of taking the Libreboot name for her again to sell used Laptops.

No: Again, her controlling the "libreboot" name has nothing to do with her selling laptops under the brand "minifree". She was adamant that libreboot start doing releases again, instead of withering away.

> This was also the moment that she began to add binary blobs to Libreboot.

No: That didn't happen until November 2022 when she merged with osboot.

When she did that, several folks (I believe with no overlap of the folks who were maintainers 2016-2021), forked libreboot.org as libreboot.at and claim to be the "true" libreboot. This libreboot.at is a snapshot of the pre-osboot-merge libreboot, and doesn't have any new releases.

Then, in June 2023, the libreboot.at folks decided to start working toward doing new releases under the "GNU Boot" name. At this time, there has not been a GNU Boot release.

> she, not satisfied, created another "GNU Boot" just to say that their project is "inferior" and now she complains about a "cease and desist" of a person that rightfully don't like her.

No: She published some GNU Boot "releases" that were clearly marked as "unofficial" incorporating work from libreboot that she thought would be useful to the GNU Boot folks. https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot... She did not create "another" GNU Boot. She did call GNU Boot "inferior", but not because her unofficial release was better, but because of the FSF's RYF and FSDG policies force it to be inferior; her unofficial GNU Boot releases are also inferior to Libreboot in the same way.

As a reminder, the GNU Boot folks are trying to take the Libreboot name from her.

Thanks for correcting me!

You may wish to disclaim yourself in a similar way on the other comments you made across the thread.

Maybe edit your original comment saying that it's not factual?

RYF: Respect your Freedom

FSDG: Free System Distribution Guidelines

With links:

RYF: Respects Your Freedom certification requirements: https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria

FSDG: Free Software Distribution Guidelines: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli...

An argument from Leah/Libreboot about why the RYF/FSDG's policies about firmware and microcode are bad: https://libreboot.org/news/policy.html

  As a reminder, the GNU Boot folks are trying to take the Libreboot name from her

to me that's not as clear cut. you can't create a new project, kill the old project and rename the new project with the old project name. it's misleading.

Leah created Libreboot, and nobody other than Leah has ever done a release of Libreboot or a Libreboot derivative.

Then, Denis and Adrien come along and decide+announce that because they don't like a change that Leah made to Libreboot, that Leah no longer gets to be the one to use the Libreboot name.

Again. delete this post. your edit at the end is useless.

[writes a ton of slander]

guys guys sorry I was wrong! but I've left the lies up, whoops how clumsy of me

Being mistaken is not "lying"; there's no reason to assume malicious intent.

That kind of attitude in open source communities is why it took them years to fix the thumbnail bug lol, but I enjoy it!

Just use port and use SmartFirmware, a BSD-licensed IEEE-1275 Open Firmware implementation. It even includes a C to OF bytecode compiler for ease in porting drivers.

As much nostalgia as I have for my Power Mac, Open Firmware doesn't solve anything in 2023. It doesn't natively boot any OS and it doesn't solve the blob "problem".

Open Firmware can boot an ELF image obtained in a variety of ways, and supply the booted image with both arguments and a device tree, it doesn’t need to do more to boot an OS. It can also be extended straightforwardly to provide boot security/attestation.

As for “solving” the “blob “problem,”” it provides a reasonable architecture for implementing drivers that are both platform- and architecture-independent; an OS can even choose to just use the drivers supplied by the firmware, by providing an equivalent environment.

In other words, it essentially solves the “How should an arbitrary system boot and pass control to an operating system, including how to interact with arbitrary devices?” problem. What more does anyone need?

In the end I agree, I wouldn't want to promote an association that is still pledging to "Defend Richard Stallman"

But the amount of Drama in this is over the top

Also, what was the last relevant project launched under the GNU Umbrella? Gneural network had the momentum of a damp toilet paper ball and I see that it was now discontinued https://www.gnu.org/software/gneuralnetwork/

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