retroboot/www/donate.md

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title: Contribute financially to the Retroboot project x-toc-enable: true ...

Introduction

Donate money to the Retroboot and Libreboot projects. Your money will be used to fund development and pay people who work on these projects. Some of the money received will be donated to the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation

Some of the money will also be donated to the coreboot, which is a member project under the Software Freedom Conservancy (coreboot uses SFC's legal infrastructure to accept donations). Libreboot and Retroboot both use coreboot extensively, for hardware initialization and neither project would be possible without coreboot!

I, Leah Rowe, am founder of both Libreboot and Retroboot. I am also the lead developer of both projects. I use whatever money is received to fund development; this also includes paying the other developers for their time on the project.

Send money via Patreon

Go here for information:

https://www.patreon.com/libreleah

You can contribute money there, using a number of payment options that Patreon supports.

Send money via Bitcoin

Send money to this bitcoin wallet:

bc1qc7yz0e3uum5nwln08dr65zapqz7xrqhuk3aqm9

This bitcoin wallet is owned and operated by Leah Rowe. This bitcoin address was last updated on 16 January 2021; keep an eye on this page in case this bitcoin address changes in the future.

How will your money be used?

I, Leah Rowe, am founder and lead developer of both Libreboot and Retroboot. I work with other developers too. This page is intended to raise money to financially assist such development on both Libreboot and Retroboot, both of which provide coreboot-based hardware initialization on supported machines.

The word donation and donate may be used here, but legally speaking it is not a donation. You are simply sending money to Leah Rowe. I use whatever money is received to pay for development costs, and I share it with the other developers in the Libreboot project, to pay them for their time working on Libreboot.

My own work is focused on:

• Adding new boards from coreboot whenever feasible
• Experimenting with coreboot payloads; for years I've preferred GNU GRUB, but lately I've been experimenting more with SeaBIOS, Tianocore and linuxboot, the latter of which is not yet present in Retroboot and Tianocore/linuxboot are both currently absent in Libreboot but will be added. For ARM (rockchip and so on) I've been experimenting with UBoot, as has Swiftgeek and Andrew.
• Providing excellent documentation, written for non-technical users (with developer documentation also provided, either in Retroboot/Libreboot or submitted upstream to projects such as coreboot)
• Working on upstream projects such as coreboot and GRUB (bug fixes, mostly, though I myself added ThinkPad T400 support to coreboot many years ago and huge improvements were made to it by other people in that project. I've also commissioned work on new coreboot ports in the past, and paid for such work)
• Work on the Libreboot and Retroboot build systems (lbmk and rbmk, not paper)
• Generally running the project, coordinating development and handling releases
• Occasionally I provide user support on IRC, but that's mostly swiftgeek's thing these days.

The two other developers, Andrew Robbins and swiftgeek, also do a lot of work.

swiftgeek focuses mainly on:

• Hardware research and reverse engineering - for example, documenting how particular feature of a board works, figuring out repairs of common faults and reviewing code against schematics.
• Providing user support on IRC - he excels at this, and a lot of new libreboot users now exist because he provided such support!

Andrew focuses mainly on:

• Work on the Libreboot build system (and has expressed interest in working on Retroboot in the future)
• Andrew is largely responsible for getting SeaGRUB working. In this config, SeaBIOS is the main payload and loads i386-pc grub instead of i386-coreboot grub, in the boot flash. The benefit of this is that you get the same benefits of GNU GRUB in flash, but now it is BIOS GRUB so can make use of x86 BIOS calls (useful for chainloading non-coreboot things such as MBR boot sector on a hard drive. i386-coreboot grub can't do that, and this is the configuration used in Libreboot and Retroboot at present).

Libreboot hasn't had a stable release since 2016. Since that date, work has been done on a new build system (the Paper build system) which adds many new features but is not yet complete. I, Leah Rowe, decided to fork Libreboot's old build system and I've made huge improvements to that in order to create Retroboot. I will soon create Retroboot-libre, based on Retroboot, which will be very similar to Libreboot. I've been authorized (by Andrew and Swiftgeek) to do a new Libreboot release based on this work, as a stop-gap to give users updated coreboot/GRUB versions and so on, and a few new machines added to the build system that can now be supported in Libreboot; this will not replace the work done on the Paper build system. Retroboot's build system is named rbmk (short for Retroboot Make) based on lbmk (Libreboot Make) and is much easier to work on than the Paper build system, enabling quicker releases schedules.

ETA for lbmk-based Libreboot release: late March 2021 to mid April 2021. More boards will be added, and existing ones will be updated to use the latest versions of coreboot, GRUB and whatever other software is required.