Free your BIOS today!


What is this?

Libreboot is a free software project aimed at replacing the proprietary boot firmware that comes with computers with free boot software.

Who are we?

Denis ‘GNUtoo’ Carikli and Adrien ‘neox’ Bourmault. We created this and maintain it. Whatever company currently provides hosting services is not responsible for the content.

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 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 Libreboot.

Our short term plans and need for help

We are seeking contributors for various jobs, both simple and technical.

The Libreboot name has a long history in the free software community. Most occurrences of the uses were intended to refer to boot software that was libre, and there is no way to edit those occurrences to refer to libre boot software by a different name. Therefore, we will continue to publish the genuinely free boot software under the name Libreboot.

You can help our project by informing people about this genuinely free version of Libreboot. Another way to help this project and take a stand for fully free software is to change URLs across the web from <libreboot.org> to <libreboot.at>, and to let people know that no other version of Libreboot is reliably free software.

While there is some documentation in our git repositories, we also need help adding explanations on how to contribute, build and test this website.

Denis ‘GNUtoo’ Carikli and Adrien ‘neox’ Bourmault are the interim maintainers of this genuine Libreboot. They will also review patches sent to the mailing list. Technoethical (an online shop that sells hardware compatible with FSF certified distributions) and Libre en Communs (a French nonprofit that acts and advocates for free software and the commons) have offered help for testing releases.

We are taking steps to ensure that our genuine Libreboot will remain free and continue to be maintained over time.

Markdown file for this page: https://libreboot.at/index.md

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