Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

libreboot.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 228 posts

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#131

Post by lodovic »

Incipient wrote: post #110
wolverine876 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an essential point. At the same time the interpretation isn't completely random or unpredictable; we're all humans, with the same emotions, the same physiological expressions of them, and the same internal responses to others' emotions. If you yell at someone anywhere, you can expect a certain range of emotional responses.

Anecdotal counterpoint about "yelling". I was having a conversation with my mother at a Cafe. After 15mins the lady next to us, very genuinely and nicely, asked if we were ok because we were yelling at each other. We're Italian. That was our normal conversation! Someone's definition of aggressive discourse is definitely not everyone's.

That's why "Sir, please don't raise your voice" is so condescending and just a way to make it look like the other party is escalating.

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#132

Post by opan »

whstl wrote: post #25
saghm wrote: post #9

Obviously we don't have the full context of prior communication, but the message screenshot is super passive aggressive ("just a little reminder you're not a maintainer" when obviously both parties are aware, "you're welcome to send us patches that we will review if we want to" very implying that the patches might just be ignored). It's possible the libreboot author also wasn't communicating professionally either, bu…

The fact that the person who sent the C&D 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 to , and to let people know that no other version of Libreboot is r…

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

#133

Post by lodovic »

teddyh wrote: post #7

GNU Boot seems to have sent it not for anything in Libreboot itself, but to adress a web page with self-proclaimed “unofficial” GNU Boot releases. They wanted it to stop proclaiming to be “unofficial GNU Boot” releases. Understandable, if a bit antagonistic. EDIT: Courtesy of user jbit¹, this is the aforementioned web page: https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot... > 1. https://news.ycombinator.…

How can they object to "unofficial" releases of Free (tm) software when anyone can pull the code and build it.

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#134

Post by slim »

LukeShu wrote: post #54
evasb wrote: post #28

Isn't Leah the person that sold ThinkPads on behalf of Libreboot, didn't send it, then put the blame on her mental issues? Then she abandoned the project and let the contributors take over, after some time she booted them with fake accusations, banned them from their IRC channel and took over the project. The contributors complained that she didn't even have the decency of contacting them, but she was adamant of taki…

> Isn't Leah the person that sold ThinkPads on behalf of Libreboot No: She sold librebooted laptops under the brand "gluglug" and later "minifree". This was never "on behalf of Libreboot"; it was always separate. > didn't send it, then put the blame on her mental issues? Yes, mostly: in 2020 minifree accumulated a backlog of orders that she wasn't able to fulfill. However, AFAIK, she did eventually ship all those ord…

  As a reminder, the GNU Boot folks are trying to take the Libreboot name from her
to me that's not as clear cut. you can't create a new project, kill the old project and rename the new project with the old project name. it's misleading.

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#135

Post by LukeShu »

slim wrote: post #134
LukeShu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't Leah the person that sold ThinkPads on behalf of Libreboot No: She sold librebooted laptops under the brand "gluglug" and later "minifree". This was never "on behalf of Libreboot"; it was always separate. > didn't send it, then put the blame on her mental issues? Yes, mostly: in 2020 minifree accumulated a backlog of orders that she wasn't able to fulfill. However, AFAIK, she did eventually ship all those ord…

As a reminder, the GNU Boot folks are trying to take the Libreboot name from her to me that's not as clear cut. you can't create a new project, kill the old project and rename the new project with the old project name. it's misleading.

Leah created Libreboot, and nobody other than Leah has ever done a release of Libreboot or a Libreboot derivative.

Then, Denis and Adrien come along and decide+announce that because they don't like a change that Leah made to Libreboot, that Leah no longer gets to be the one to use the Libreboot name.

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#136

Post by slim »

LukeShu wrote: post #130
slim wrote: post #116

[flagged]

Leah created Libreboot in 2014. Leah stepped away from Libreboot in 2016, after some drama between her and the FSF. Two Libreboot community members, Andrew and Sebastian, became the Libreboot maintainers. In 2021, after Andrew and Sebastian managed to go 5 years without doing a release, Leah forcefully took the project back over in order to get releases going again. Leah also started a "sister project" to Libreboot,…

She said Denis is an early contributor

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#137

Post by opan »

catboybotnet wrote: post #75

Functional code is better than non-functional code. What good is libreboot if you can't use it? You're more than welcome to use the now-maintained notgnuboot.vimuser.org or libreboot censored if you hate binary blobs, and are also more than welcome to try to find hardware that doesn't have closed source blobs built in. I love free software, and will never stop, but "Libre" is only great in a vacuum.

I have come around on the driver blob issue a bit in recent years. Something using software blobs can be RE'd and become fully free someday, but is not FSF-approved until it is. Burn the same blobs into the hardware where they can't be changed and the FSF approves because "it's as good as it can get", however they're really about equal levels of freedom, and the software one can become better later on, so it starts to seem silly. I don't want to imply people should stop fighting the fight, more like grabbing some of the FSF-approved hardware feels like giving up on the fight actually.

Saying this as someone who has replaced and removed WLAN cards in laptops that need blobs, and used FSF-approved distros long-term.

Somewhat related, I think the Apple Silicon MacBooks will end up replacing many people's old ThinkPads someday thanks to the work from the Asahi team. (A bit early right now, especially if you have one newer than an M1.)

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#138

Post by lelanthran »

bombolo wrote: post #117
wkat4242 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is by far the better desktop, Gnome will never be great as long as they abhor choice. The "you're using it wrong" is too strong there.

and yet people love apple

> and yet people love apple

That doesn't minimise the impact of open-source software.

I've yet to see an Apple user who doesn't install brew as a first step before doing anything with their computer.

From what I see, people may love Apple's OS, but they can't use it with without open-source tools.

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#139

Post by mst »

neilv wrote: post #27
saghm wrote: post #9

Obviously we don't have the full context of prior communication, but the message screenshot is super passive aggressive ("just a little reminder you're not a maintainer" when obviously both parties are aware, "you're welcome to send us patches that we will review if we want to" very implying that the patches might just be ignored). It's possible the libreboot author also wasn't communicating professionally either, bu…

I have to remind myself not to read too much into such things, for three reasons that we all know, but which may bear repeating to ourselves: 1. Open source is global, and not everyone is a native speaker of English. 2. Among English speakers, not everyone has the same cultural conventions and nuances. Even within US cities, you can drive 15 minutes, and find very different conventions. And culture in Boston isn't th…

I've had to referee disagreements between East Coast USians and Germans a few times before now, mostly in terms of acting as a protocol translation layer until they were both sufficiently calmed down to underail themselves and focus on the technical side again rather than being distracted by their differing communication styles.

Generally once I'd helped them unpick that they collaborated happily and came up with something good that they both liked, it's just once people are locked in to talking past each other it's often non-trivial to break out of that.

Re: GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

#140

Post by mst »

amatecha wrote: post #108
arcanemachiner wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 mat…

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.
Post reply on HN