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snip 

i got a very respectable email last night from a person
who i now hold in very high regard. and the email merits
a response - and the response will be a good one.

Signed-off-by: Leah Rowe <leah@libreboot.org>
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Leah Rowe 2025-02-18 07:55:53 +00:00
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@ -1515,98 +1515,3 @@ the erstwhile *gluglug* domain then redirecting to it, and I registered Minifree
Ltd in the UK. Minifree is how I fund the Libreboot project, by selling computers
with Libreboot pre-installed. You can find it
on [minifree.org](https://minifree.org/).
January 1st, 2025, UPDATE!
------------------------
And some facts discovered in February 2025 have also been added!
### Cold Boot War II
The truce of 2024 has ended. GNU did a talk during 38C3 conference, where
they spent at least *one third* of the talk, telling people to stop using
Libreboot, to stop promoting Libreboot, stop contributing to it. This is an
act of war against the Libreboot project. Their decision, in the talk,
demonstrated that they have all the same intentions that they originally had
in their LibrePlanet 2023 talk, that lead to the *first* Cold Boot War. Their
intent is that Libreboot must cease to exist, and that they must replace it;
they are not content simply with existing in their own right, rather, they want
their existence *to replace mine*.
Intent matters. A lot of people might disagree, but the world runs on dreams.
What we do in the moment is just an manifestation of dreams. Their dream is
to *destroy the Libreboot project*.
Therefore, Cold Boot War II was declared, in the early hours of January 1st, 2025.
There won't be much material difference as a result of this, but the consequence
is that there is no longer good will from Libreboot towards the GNU project.
I *was* going to approach the GNU project and start a discussion about shutting
down the Canoeboot project, and merge it with GNU. As of January 2025, GNU's
own Libreboot fork *still* uses the same late 2021 coreboot and GRUB revisions
that it used when they started back in June 2023. As of December 2024, the
Canoeboot project used upstream revisions *from December 2024* and with
completely up to date documentation.
Canoeboot is vastly superior to anything GNU would ever do, or has done.
Canoeboot's highly efficient [design](https://canoeboot.org/docs/maintain/)
is much simpler and more powerful in practise, doing *more* in fewer lines
of code - and it supports more hardware. Canoeboot is, at this time, interested
in more GM45-based Dell Latitude models and X4x-based Dell OptiPlex 780 variants,
among other ports. Other works are also planned.
For those interested, GNU's anti-Libreboot talk is here (they also talk trash
about Canoeboot, though to a lesser extent than they do about Libreboot):
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHJ9m6HRwq0**
In it, they strongly imply that all Libreboot boards use Intel FSP/MRC, which
isn't true. Everything up to Haswell uses completely free raminit; completely
free initialisation within coreboot.
In general, Libreboot's [Binary Blob Reduction Policy](policy.md) dictates
that if Free Software *can* be used, it must be - as a result, many systems
supported by Libreboot, boot entirely with free software. Libreboot is a free
software project, whose primary goal is to increase software freedoms for users
by providing them with free boot firmware. And yet: the GNU talk strongly
suggests that Libreboot is a *proprietary software project*.
In that same GNU talk, GNU directly states that I, Leah Rowe, am "against 100%
free software" - also false. I want everyone to use Free Software exclusively,
but the reality is that this is literally impossible, on any hardware. The
reason is strongly described in Libreboot's [Freedom Status](../freedom-status.md)
and [Binary Blob Reduction Policy](policy.md) pages.
They lie and lie and lie about me and about the Libreboot project, because if
they actually discussed the [nuance](policy.md) of Libreboot policy, they are
worried that more people might agree with Libreboot. They don't care about the
reality; they are also hypocrites, since they still use Libreboot and Canoeboot
themselves. For example, in their FOSDEM 2025 talk about machine learning, the
executive director of the FSF is clearly using a Dell Latitude E6400:
<https://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/FOSDEM/video/2025/k1105/fosdem-2025-4818-fsf-s-criteria-for-free-machine-learning-applications.av1.webm>;
look about 46 minutes in and it shows the whole laptop. Their own project does
not support this laptop, only Libreboot and Canoeboot do! And neox told me on
IRC during February 2025 that he uses Libreboot on a ThinkPad T440p. So... why
should anyone take them seriously? GNU policy has little merit - Libreboot ignores
it, because their policy limits the amount of hardware that can be supported - and
what merit does it have at all when its creators don't even follow it? As of
February 2025, Richard Stallman's own website still claims that he uses a
Libreboot system: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250211204821/https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html>.
I could probably dig even deeper and find more examples, but you get the point.
On merit, they are weak - and they don't even believe in their own merit. That
is why they need to attack the Libreboot project on their own project's website.
They could criticise just coreboot, which is the project they are actually dealing
with, but that's too hard; Libreboot is, to them, the easier target. They are
essentially cowards. Luckily, Libreboot and Canoeboot are literally *years ahead*
of them, on a technological level - and many of their people use Canoeboot and
Libreboot, because they get it: Libreboot is providing them with what they actually
need, namely, a free software boot project that tries to support as many machines
as possible, so it actually supports the hardware that they want to use.
I was actually banned from the FSF's IRC channel on Libera, specifically because
I called neox (Adrien Bourmault) a hypocrite for using Libreboot, despite being
one of the co-founders of GNU's fork of Libreboot, that heavily criticises
Libreboot - and despite the fact that neox himself, in the above linked 38c3
talk, heavily critises *me*. He lies, claiming that I oppose free software,
while using my project. Weak, weak, weak. I don't respect [hypocrites](https://vimuser.org/hypocrites.html) at all,
and neither should you.