News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by whstl on Saturday July 29, 2023 @10:33PM (#36927228)
The fact that the person who sent the email allegedly tried to "take over" the Libreboot name (according to TFA) is also not a good look.

I found this: https://libreboot.at

> Who are we? Denis ‘GNUtoo’ Carikli and Adrien ‘neox’ Bourmault. We created this and maintain it.

> 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

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by evasb on Saturday July 29, 2023 @10:38PM (#36927265)
They didn't try to take over the Libreboot. They were maintaining until Leah took over in a very unethical way.

You can see that they abandoned the Libreboot name and founded GNU Boot, that Leah is now trying to take over (the name) too.

Anyway, this drama is highly personal and Leah is not a trustworthy person.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by whstl on Saturday July 29, 2023 @10:54PM (#36927361)
I have no idea who those people are and their pasts, and have no horse in this race, but according to the https://libreboot.at website by Adrien Bourmault, Leah was the founder of the project.

According to this [1], the alleged takeover you mention not only didn't involve Adrien or Denis Carikli, it also happened two years before the creation of https://libreboot.at, which seems to be from 2023 [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210331005023/https://libreboot... or https://www.andrewrobbins.info/libreboot.html if you want a third-party

[2] https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/libreboot-devel/2023-0...

Either way, it seems that if there was any problem around the usage of the GNU Boot name, it was solved by adding disclaimers galore: http://notgnuboot.vimuser.org/

To me the disclaimers above show enough good faith. Meanwhile https://libreboot.at continues up. I don't think we should be that harsh and accusatory to someone after they actually comply with the request of changing a page name and adding disclaimers.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by Propelloni on Sunday July 30, 2023 @05:23AM (#36929384)
It appears to be a bonfire of vanities on all sides. One side goes "I use the trust you invested in me to block you from project resources, because my other project is soo much better but has less name-recognition." The other side goes "We are more pure, more righteous, and more petty at the same time! Let's show the other side by registering a confusing domain name and release a similiar but still different software with a long blurb why the other side is bad and must be destroyed! Oh yeah, and let's write scathing e-mails so nobody misses that we are petty."

This seems so weird to me. Why invest the energy? In the olden days we'd just fork and get to work.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by whstl on Sunday July 30, 2023 @05:37AM (#36929464)
'One side goes"I use the trust you invested in me to block you from project resources, because my other project is soo much better but has less name-recognition"'

As some of us already said multiple times, this is a completely different story and unrelated to this. Let's maybe lets this misunderstanding die?

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by pravus on Sunday July 30, 2023 @06:24AM (#36929719)
Welcome to the GNU universe. This kind of thing was more prominent in the 00's and I've basically sworn off ever contributing to any GPL projects or using GPL licenses because of how GNU has acted over time. At odd times they get extremely vocal over issues and the responses are typically of the "you are wrong" kind.
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by amatecha on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:13AM (#36928037)
Rather than append an edit at the end, just delete your post if it was completely debunked, otherwise people, like myself, read a paragraph of text only to learn it's all apparently "debunked".
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by Incipient on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:36AM (#36928178)
It's an interesting point. I think it's educational to have people obviously adjusting their position when corrected. It's almost a rarity these days, and I think someone accepting they were wrong is refreshing!

Granted, the TLDR at the top would have helped haha, especially if it was a long post.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by arcanemachiner on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:21AM (#36928088)
Maybe a TLDR at the top would be better. There's often some pretty crucial context that gets nuked when the entire post gets deleted.
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by amatecha on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:30AM (#36928135)
Yeah I guess that could be better. I literally just read every comment by that user (not realizing it was the same person), thinking "oh dang this is rough" and then at the end seeing the "EDIT lol nm" and realizing I just totally got misled, AGAIN. Super uncool. If your text is proven false, I don't want to read it or even glance at it (or even have to scroll past it, or have my network/browser load it, for that matter).
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by mst on Sunday July 30, 2023 @02:50AM (#36928549)
I agree with putting it at the top, but leaving the mistake there but marked as being a mistake is useful in case somebody else accidentally makes the same mistake later.
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by dcow on Sunday July 30, 2023 @02:56AM (#36928582)
You can only edit for a few hours.
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by amatecha on Sunday July 30, 2023 @04:16AM (#36929029)
Yeah, guess it was already too late then. :\
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by enneff on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:27AM (#36928118)
You should be more reluctant to label someone as “not trustworthy”!

FWIW today is the first I’ve heard of Leah and I spent some time reading their website (vimuser.org) and they seem to be quite conscientious and thorough in explaining their work and the rationales behind it. This whole thing has kindled some interest in using a free boot loader on my system. Looking forward to trying it out.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by opan on Sunday July 30, 2023 @02:26AM (#36928434)
I'm not up to date on these events yet, but GNUtoo is a Guix contributor I see around a fair bit on the mailing list and IRC, which makes this seem more interesting. It's not just a random person who got mad about stuff, but someone very involved in other official GNU stuff. Not familiar with neox, but wouldn't surprise me if they're similarly involved in free software stuff elsewhere.
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by ddalex on Sunday July 30, 2023 @03:42AM (#36928809)
I don't understand the frackas about a library that reboots your computer being free or not....
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by mPReDiToR on Sunday July 30, 2023 @03:52AM (#36928866)
I read it that way too.

Lib reboot.

Always have, but it took LibreOffice becoming mainstream to make the correction mostly unnoticeable.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by Gracana on Sunday July 30, 2023 @12:02PM (#36932618)
My favorite is the GNU libiberty library, which is picked up when you pass the -liberty option to gcc. :D
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by mcv on Sunday July 30, 2023 @04:56AM (#36929267)
I hadn't heard about this drama before, but as I can piece things together, Leah has been maintaining Libreboot and another boot system for years. Denis and Adrien disagreed with Leah's decision to include binaries, created their own version of Libreboot without those binaries and published it under the same name on a very similar domain trying to claim the existing Libreboot name for their version.

Then I suspect Leah disagreed with that fork both on technical merits (it's based on old code) and with the stealing of the name, but she agreed with the need for a version without the binaries, so she made that and published it under the name GNUboot, intended for Denis and Adrien to base their work on, and now Denis and Adrien are complaining that she's misusing the GNU name.

Is that roughly a correct summary?

Because if it is, it sounds to me like both sides do have valid points, but handled the disagreement very poorly. Denis and Adrien complaining that Leah stole the GNU name when they just stole the Libreboot name, sounds very hypocritical. The whole thing would be a lot better if both sides stopped the drama and powergames and just worked together to create the best possible boot systems; one with the binaries and one without.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by bbarnett on Sunday July 30, 2023 @06:07AM (#36929615)
I often wonder if someone is whispering in people's ears, to destroy such projects.

For example, a long email history on any of these people(and even if you don't use, people you email do use gmail), from a central store such as gmail, would provide immense insight into personality traits, etc.

Which means external motivaters could be used as handy leavers to drive dissent.

Little spats like this, erode project trust, and just divert energy.

Anyhow, no idea if this is happening. I guess if you really do want to destroy something, just let Oracle buy it, so maybe I'm off here.

Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by toyg on Sunday July 30, 2023 @09:55AM (#36931175)
Most FOSS projects are unpaid, and the only reward is nerd-fame. That's why maintainers are often petty about credits and "ownership".
Re:GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot by wlerin on Sunday July 30, 2023 @11:56AM (#36932565)
Seems like a faster route to destruction would be letting Elon buy it.

But yeah, this does seem to happen painfully often. The particulars of this specific incident remind me a lot of the FFmpeg vs LibAV split (or the LibAV+Debian vs. FFmpeg+Everyone Else split).