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by LukeShu 1059 days ago
> 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 orders, and minifree is in a good place today.

> Then she abandoned the project and let the contributors take over

Sorta: She had removed herself as a Libreboot maintainer after the 2016 drama between her and the FSF. She had already long not been a Libreboot maintainer by the time she encountered trouble in 2020.

> 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

Yes: She did forcefully take Libreboot back over in 2021. But, in the 5 years of SwiftGeek et al. being the Libreboot maintainers, they never shipped a release. At the the time she took it back over, the last release was more than 5 years old, shipped by Leah before she stepped away in 2016. So IMO her taking it back over was the right thing, even if how she did it was shitty.

> but she was adamant of taking the Libreboot name for her again to sell used Laptops.

No: Again, her controlling the "libreboot" name has nothing to do with her selling laptops under the brand "minifree". She was adamant that libreboot start doing releases again, instead of withering away.

> This was also the moment that she began to add binary blobs to Libreboot.

No: That didn't happen until November 2022 when she merged with osboot.

When she did that, several folks (I believe with no overlap of the folks who were maintainers 2016-2021), forked libreboot.org as libreboot.at and claim to be the "true" libreboot. This libreboot.at is a snapshot of the pre-osboot-merge libreboot, and doesn't have any new releases.

Then, in June 2023, the libreboot.at folks decided to start working toward doing new releases under the "GNU Boot" name. At this time, there has not been a GNU Boot release.

> she, not satisfied, created another "GNU Boot" just to say that their project is "inferior" and now she complains about a "cease and desist" of a person that rightfully don't like her.

No: She published some GNU Boot "releases" that were clearly marked as "unofficial" incorporating work from libreboot that she thought would be useful to the GNU Boot folks. https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot... She did not create "another" GNU Boot. She did call GNU Boot "inferior", but not because her unofficial release was better, but because of the FSF's RYF and FSDG policies force it to be inferior; her unofficial GNU Boot releases are also inferior to Libreboot in the same way.

As a reminder, the GNU Boot folks are trying to take the Libreboot name from her.

3 comments

RYF: Respect your Freedom

FSDG: Free System Distribution Guidelines

With links:

RYF: Respects Your Freedom certification requirements: https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria

FSDG: Free Software Distribution Guidelines: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli...

An argument from Leah/Libreboot about why the RYF/FSDG's policies about firmware and microcode are bad: https://libreboot.org/news/policy.html

Thanks for correcting me!
Maybe edit your original comment saying that it's not factual?
You may wish to disclaim yourself in a similar way on the other comments you made across the thread.

  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.