Librecore: Aiming To Be A Better Libre Spin Of Coreboot

Librecore is a new project aiming to be a new Coreboot downstream with a focus remaining on providing fully-free system firmware. Separately, Minifree/Libreboot has been accused (and admitted by Leah Rowe) to not paying a vendor for a completed contract.

Librecore was formed due to "[Libreboot lead developer Leah Rowe] alienating large portions of the community, plus the stagnant and hard to use libreboot firmware and build system." With Librecore, they are aiming to use industry-standard tools and build environments. Another different design decision is pursuing Petitboot as the payload for a more modern and useful interface over GRUB as a payload.

There is also some crowdfunding work going on around a particular effort.

Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering is one of the developers involved with the formation of Librecore. Raptor is the company behind the Talos Secure Workstation effort. Aside from all the drama surrounding Libreboot's accusations against the FSF and Libreboot leaving the GNU, he has also stated that Leah Rowe has refused paying him for contract work done on Libreboot. Timothy Pearson was the developer responsible for freeing the ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboard for Libreboot. Here's the email from Pearson:

As you may be aware, Minifree (Leah Rowe) contracted with us to port the KCMA-D8 and release it. We performed this work and the KCMA-D8 continues to operate, however Minifree has decided not to pay any of their contract on this work.

We strongly recommend that no person do any business with Minifree or its founder Leah Rowe, as they do not honor their legally binding contracts.

As a result of Minifree's public meltdown, we were part of the initial team that started a community based blob-free firmware project called librecore. We may also start sales of blob-free desktop / workstation systems in the near future to cover this hole in the market.

The project is still in its infancy, but more details on Librecore can be found via their new project site at LibreCore.info or RaptorEngineering.com for information on their work.

Update: I've now received an email from Leah Rowe. In regards to her not paying Raptor, she says, "I paid 100% of the KGPE-D16 contract with was 75k USD I did not pay the KCMA-D8 contract which was 15k. Please can you add this information to the article, because right now the article implies that I barely paid any of it. The D8 was a mere extension on top of the D16 and was 2 weeks work for Timothy...Libreboot is not a dead project. We are currently working on a new release behind the scenes. We've merged an entirely new build system that was written from scratch, to replace the old one " She also wrote that Libreboot is going to abandon Coreboot upstream in favor of Librecore.