---
title: Free your BIOS today!
...

### What is this? ####

Libreboot is a free software project aimed at replacing the proprietary
boot firmware that comes with computers with free boot software.

### How this project came to exist ####

We believe computer users deserve to control all the software they
run.  This belief is the key principle of the Free Software Movement,
and was the motive for developing the GNU operating system and
starting the Free Software Foundation.  We believe computer user
freedom is a crucial human rights.

In order to achieve our goal, it is crucial that we call a program
"free" or "libre" only when it is indeed free in its entirety.  When
we talk about specific programs, we must not muddle the facts about
what is free and what is not.  If people start referring to a progran
as "libre," when parts of it are not in fact libre, that tends to lead
the community astray.

Unfortunately, such a muddle happened last year with a boot program
that was free software and was called Libreboot: the development team
added nonfree code to it, but continued to refer to it misleadingly as
"Libreboot".

Libreboot was first released in 2013. It has been widely recommended
in the free software community for the last nine years. In November
2022, "Libreboot" began to include non-libre code.  We have made
repeated efforts to continue collaboration with those developers on to
help their version of Libreboot remain libre, but that was not
successful.

Now we've stepped forward to stand up for freedom, ours and that of
the wider community, by maintaining our own version -- a genuinely libre
Libreboot.

### Our short term plans and need for help ###

We are seeking contributors for various jobs, both simple and technical.

The Libreboot name has a long history in the free software community.
Most occurrences of the uses were intended to refer to boot software
that was libre, and there is no way to edit those occurrences to refer
to libre boot software by a different name.  Therefore, we will
continue to publish the genuinely free boot software under the name
Libreboot.

You can help our project by informing people about this genuinely free
version of Libreboot. Another way to help this project and 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.

While there is some documentation in our git repositories, we also
need help adding explanations on how to contribute, build and test
this website.

Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli and Adrien 'neox' Bourmault are the interim
maintainers of this genuine Libreboot.  They will also review patches
sent to the mailing list. Technoethical (an online shop that sells
hardware compatible with FSF certified distributions) and Libre en
Communs (a French nonprofit that acts and advocates for free software
and the commons) have offered help for testing releases.

We are taking steps to ensure that our genuine Libreboot will remain
free and continue to be maintained over time.