Adanisi, 2 years ago (edited 2 years ago)

To be fair, while it’s the Libreboot creator’s project and they can do whatever they want with it, I can see why people are upset that Libreboot has had the “Libre” in it’s name seemingly neglected.

The FSF is an ideological organisation. It’s important that they exist. It’s also important that pure free software exists. Pragmatism is also important, but without any purity, the “extreme” of software freedom gets watered down, and so the window of an “acceptable” amount of proprietary-ness shifts as a new, less hardline “extreme” takes it’s place, if that makes sense. We should be striving for full software freedom, even if it’s currently just a dream.

Libreboot was a pure libre software project. Now it isn’t. Originally, a fork called osboot was created with the new blob reduction policy. That was fine, because it was a different name that didn’t mislead (also because nobody knew osboot as the fully free BIOS replacement). Then that policy became Libreboot policy. Libreboot is no longer fully libre, despite it having been exactly that for it’s whole life. It had an established name as the fully free BIOS replacement. It was known for that. Hence the upset.

Also, I see Canoeboot as a success. Rowe seems to be doing it out of spite, but it’s achieved what the GNU project wants. It has successfully pushed Rowe to at least provide some sort of fully free release again.