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This project is a joke when it comes to professionalism and quality and it is unfairly giving free software a bad image. The first thing that came to mind when

This project is a joke when it comes to professionalism and quality and it is unfairly giving free software a bad image. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was thinking it was going to be an old article about what happened for years ago when this maintainer abruptly withdrew the project from GNU with absolutely zero advance notice to anyone. This is why companies pay millions of dollars for Enterprise Linux or, because of its bad image, don't want to use free software at all. Open source firmware is a great and necessary idea, but I do not think the Libreboot project, cool as it may be, is ever going to make substantial progress towards that (for non-decade old laptops).

duskwuff 6y ago
> Open source firmware is a great and necessary idea, but I do not think the Libreboot project, cool as it may be, is ever going to make substantial progress towards that (for non-decade old laptops). Not only that, but the Coreboot project -- which Libreboot is a fork from -- has been making incremental progress towards open-source firmware. Their firmware still contains some binary blobs, but, unlike Libreboot, it's actually usable on some modern hardware, and they're making progress towards replacing some of those blobs with free substitutes.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Actually, I'm a bit out of the loop - is coreboot a strict superset of libreboot? Can you do a checkout of the coreboot code and do something like `./configure --no-blobs --target=thinkpadx60 && make` for systems that support it and get effectively the same thing that libreboot would have given you?
  - spijdar 6y ago
    Not a strict superset, it's more accurate to say libreboot is a restricted and modified (old) subset of coreboot. I don't think coreboot has catered to blob free enthusiasts the same way libreboot has, and I believe the build system is different, so the answer is probably no (?)
  - rambojazz 6y ago
    Libreboot is one of the several distributions of coreboot. Looks like coreboot only provides the sources but not the compiled binaries.

duskwuff 6y ago

> Open source firmware is a great and necessary idea, but I do not think the Libreboot project, cool as it may be, is ever going to make substantial progress towards that (for non-decade old laptops). Not only that, but the Coreboot project -- which Libreboot is a fork from -- has been making incremental progress towards open-source firmware. Their firmware still contains some binary blobs, but, unlike Libreboot, it's actually usable on some modern hardware, and they're making progress towards replacing some of those blobs with free substitutes.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Actually, I'm a bit out of the loop - is coreboot a strict superset of libreboot? Can you do a checkout of the coreboot code and do something like `./configure --no-blobs --target=thinkpadx60 && make` for systems that support it and get effectively the same thing that libreboot would have given you?
- spijdar 6y ago
  Not a strict superset, it's more accurate to say libreboot is a restricted and modified (old) subset of coreboot. I don't think coreboot has catered to blob free enthusiasts the same way libreboot has, and I believe the build system is different, so the answer is probably no (?)
- rambojazz 6y ago
  Libreboot is one of the several distributions of coreboot. Looks like coreboot only provides the sources but not the compiled binaries.