Canoeboot 20231026 Released As Another Fork Of Coreboot-Downstream Libreboot

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canoeboot 20231026 Released As Another Fork Of Coreboot-Downstream Libreboot

Leah Rowe has announced the inaugural release of Canoeboot, what is another fork of Leah's own Libreboot that continues to serve as a free software minded fork of Coreboot...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Canoeboot-20231026

[Almindor]

Somebody should give all these forks the boot

[mxan]

So much drama over something so irrelevant in the grand scheme of things

[Pander]

Put "varying degrees of stricter source requirements" in a config file and go back to one project.

And to contribute to the grand scheme of things, set an example of playing together nicely.

I would even contribute to a bounty to unfork and merge certain projects.

[justinkb]

Fork bomb

[mos87]

In general, the concept of limiting functionality by purging software in the name of free-ness is daft. How are you gonna promote Free Software if you restrict it to a smaller number of users?
While in this particular case it also carries the problems of ego, mental health (or lack thereof), activism (in a sad, hijacked sense), etc..

[OneTimeShot]

I don't think anything other than CoreBoot is needed. Maybe someone can add build variables to disable stuff if they are worried about "how free it is".

It's not like you can install CoreBoot *and* LibreBoot/CanoeBoot on a system at the same time.

[timofonic]

ForkBoot hell...

[fitzie]

I've done a bit of research of this situation, and there's a bunch of the history I will not get into here that I think is interesting, but the big beats are:

linuxbios: in the beginning it was bits of the linux kernel made to work in a prebios situation
coreboot: as it became clear that this environment would have to be a hard fork of whatever linux code they used, they renamed themselves to make it clear they are on their own path now.
libreboot: largely just a distribution of coreboot, but they did create a new build system and several reverse engineered components to remove some binary blobs, this was an official GNU project, but no longer is. As a GNU project they had a strict no binaries policy, that even disallowed cpu microcode firmware.
osboot: a "fork" of libreboot with more liberal policies for what binary blobs would be allowed. this was done by the maintainers of libreboot, and after two years was folded back in to libreboot, and at that time libreboot's policy towards binary blobs became more lax.

That was the history now begins this current situation:

GNU boot: GNU decides to create a corebios distribution that is more strict again, using libreboot as a starting point. This is just created earlier this summer.

"unofficial" GNU boot -> non-GeNUine boot: libreboot maintainers catch wind of the GNU effort, and attempts to cut them off, creating a new fork of libreboot using GNU's policy. Because it was called GNU boot (with the "unofficial" label), the GNU project though that would create confusion and asked them to stop, hence the rename to non-GeNUine boot.

Now we have finally "canoeboot" which is effectively renaming of non-GeNUine boot, which is the rename of "unofficial" GNU boot, which is just libreboot with the GNU boot policy, and entirely exists to make GNU boot effort unneeded. If you listen to GNU's pronunciation ( https://www.gnu.org/gnu/pronunciation.en.html ) it's pronounced "gah-new", which rhymes with canoe. I don't think that's a coincidence at all.

Therefore, I think I've learned nothing of value in the 30 minutes it took me to understand this all, and I want that time back so desperately. I've written this up so you don't waste any more time then it takes to read this, and perhaps my suffering wasn't a total loss.

--
After writing this I reread the article Michael wrote and can see you can see most of this story in his article however it misses the details that this was all in response to a real (not "unofficial") GNU boot, and the fact that these are not just config options is due to GNU preferences to not hosting any of the bad binary blobs even in git. As well as the history around how the binary policies in these projects were shaped by its connection to FSF and the osboot defork a while back.

[Old Grouch]

Thank you for writing up your 30 minutes. It would have taken me longer.