Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
d02481b589
At the beginning I tried to describe the GNU Boot project in a single sentence to be as simple as possible for less technical users. But then I ended up having to explain again and again to people that GNU Boot is only a distribution. We probably had this problem for a very long time, as Libreboot also had the same issue, and since we inherited all its code and that we continue its original spirit, we also have the same issue. And I still had to correct people very recently even long after having changed the Savannah project description page and having restructured a bit the build system to look more like packages. So here I see no other option than changing the front page as well, as getting this point across is important, especially when we are looking for contributions, as contributing to a distribution is often easier than contributing to upstream software. Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org> Acked-by: Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
2.2 KiB
title: Free your BIOS today! ...
What is this?
GNU Boot is a 100% free software project aimed at replacing the nonfree boot software (like BIOS or UEFI) of computers with free boot software.
GNU Boot is only a distribution: it reuses existing software projects like Coreboot, GRUB, SeaBIOS, etc.
So it's not very different from 100% free GNU/Linux distributions like Trisquel or Guix.
Like the other 100% free GNU/Linux distributions its tasks are:
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To find and remove nonfree software in projects it reuses.
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To build the software and assemble it in something that can be installed. To test it and to provide installation and upgrade instructions.
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To provide good default configuration that work for most users.
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 is called Libreboot: the development team added nonfree code to it, but continued to use "Libre" in its name.
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 Libreboot, that after some hurdles gave birth to this project: GNU Boot.