A niche corner of the Linux world is occupied by the Free Software community spearheaded by the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation (FSF), created by the well-known Richard Stallman. This community advocates for the use of copyleft licenses like the GNU Public License which gives you the freedom to run, study, distribute, and improve software but any projects that use code from these projects also have to use the GPL.
Some people in this community, including Stallman, refuse to run software written with non-free code for ethical reasons. Unfortunately, a core piece of software called GNU Boot, which helps the system to boot up, has been found to contain non-free software and it affects many distributions - that means that many of these techno-vegans have been eating techno-meat.
Explaining the problem in more technical detail, the GNU Boot project said that the vboot source code used in Coreboot and in the vboot-utils package, contains the non-free code in its test data in tests/futility/data. To address the issue, it has cleaned up the code and re-released the affected tarball packages, code improvements have also been made.
The GNU Boot team has said that it also needs to contact affected distributions but because there are a lot of them to contact it is asking volunteers to help. To get started, it has begun by contacting those distributions that ship the vboot source code, such as PureOS and Trisquel. According to the bug report, Dragora, Hyperbola, LibreCMC, and ProteanOS don't have vboot included.
It has also contacted the chief free software Android ROM, Replicant, which also ships the vboot source code. It has also contacted other common distributions that require certain repositories to have free software, such as Debian. It said that contact still needs to be made with Fedora.
This is not the first time non-free code has been found. In December 2023, GNU Boot was found to be using non-free microcode in the first RC1 release. This was fixed by remaking the tarball by hand with the non-free software removed.
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