Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
3f365ac849
The file contains the following copyright header:
// This file contains an 'Intel Peripheral Driver' and is
// licensed for Intel CPUs and chipsets under the terms of your
// license agreement with Intel or your vendor. [...]
[...]
// Copyright (c) 2010-2013 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved
// This software and associated documentation (if any) is furnished
// under a license and may only be used or copied in accordance
// with the terms of the license. Except as permitted by such
// license, no part of this software or documentation may be
// reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
// form or by any means without the express written consent of
// Intel Corporation.
While there is also many contradicting statements like this one in
src/soc/intel/fsp_baytrail/Kconfig:
## This file is part of the coreboot project.
##
## Copyright (C) 2011 The ChromiumOS Authors. All rights reserved.
## Copyright (C) 2013-2014 Sage Electronic Engineering, LLC.
##
## This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
## it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
## the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
##
## This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
## but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
## GNU General Public License for more details.
The baytrail FSP was added in Coreboot by the commit
954f3882f1ea8512de9a5a6a38569c36bffae405 ("Add the Bay Trail FSP
include & srx directories") by Martin Roth, proably not on behalf on
Intel.
The commit also contains an email address from Martin Roth with the
se-eng.com domain (from Sage Electronic Engineering) and doesn't
contain any email address related to Intel. This increase the
probability that Intel wasn't involved in adding the Bay Trail FSP to
Coreboot.
Because of the (strong) doubts, the fact that the Bay Trail FSP was
also removed upstream and that GNU Boot doesn't support computers with
Intel Bay Trail, it's easier to just remove the nonfree software.
Reported-by: Leah Rowe <info@minifree.org>
Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>
Acked-by: Adrien Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
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| .gitignore | ||
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| COPYING | ||
| Makefile.am | ||
| README.md | ||
| autogen.sh | ||
| build | ||
| configure.ac | ||
| download | ||
| modify | ||
| projectname | ||
| update | ||
README.md
GNU Boot
This software is part of the GNU Project.
To load an operating system, computers need to be able to access storage devices (like an HDD or SSD) where the operating system is installed. They need RAM to work to load part of the operating system in RAM. Users also expect the display and keyboard to work before the operating system is loaded.
But on most computers, software is needed to initialize the RAM, the storage devices, the graphic card, to load the operating system, and give some information to the operating system on what hardware it is running on.
Because of that computers usually require boot software that is bundled in the computer. It is usually found on a very small storage chip that is inside the mainboard. That software is specific to a given computer.
Unfortunately that software is usually nonfree and GNU boot aims to replace that with 100% free software.
Like with other type of software, the fact that it is nonfree has real impacts. For instance this software often continues to run once the operating system is loaded and as it loads the operating system it can also modify it.
So having a nonfree boot software make it impossible for users to really trust their computers. Another common issue is that some BIOS/UEFI add restrictions to prevent users from replacing the WiFi card for instance. There are many more issues but listing them all here would make this description too long.
To replace nonfree boot software, GNU boot reuses various software projects (like Coreboot, U-boot, GRUB, SeaBIOS, etc), configure and build them to produce an image that can be installed to replace the nonfree boot software for specific computers.
Users can also do all that without GNU Boot but that tend to be complicated. Having a free software project that does all that enable people to collaborate on making sure that computers boot fine regardless of the upstream project status, for instance by making binary releases and collaborating to test them.
In addition GNU boot also comes with extensive documentation to make it as easy as possible to install GNU Boot and to empower users to modify the way their computer boot.
Since not all the project it reuses are 100% free software it also removes all the nonfree software found in them along the way and will also make the scripts and/or data that does that reusable for distributions or users that want to build their own free boot software without reusing the GNU Boot configuration or build system.
Not a coreboot fork!
GNU Boot is not a fork of coreboot, but more a boot firmware distribution including a modified version of coreboot, and other software like SeaBIOS, GRUB or u-boot.
Coreboot is not entirely free software as it includes binary blobs in it for some platforms. What GNU Boot does is download several revisions of coreboot, for different boards, and de-blob those coreboot revisions. This is done using the linux-libre deblob scripts, to find binary blobs in coreboot.
All new coreboot development should be done in coreboot (upstream), not GNU Boot. For example, if you wanted to add a new board to GNU Boot, you should add it to coreboot first. GNU Boot would then receive your code at a later date, when it updates itself.
The deblobbed coreboot tree used in GNU Boot is referred to as coreboot-libre, to distinguish it as a component of GNU Boot.
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.
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 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 boot distribution: GNU Boot.
LICENSE FOR THIS README: GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 as published by the Free Software Foundation, with no invariant sections, no front cover texts and no back cover texts. If you wish it, you may use a later version of the GNU Free Documentation License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
Copy of the GNU Free Documentation License v1.3 here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html
Info about Free Software Foundation: https://www.fsf.org/