Libreboot joins Software in the Public Interest (SPI) as Associated Project
8 September 2025
Article published by: Leah Rowe
Date of publication: 8 September 2025
Libreboot is a coreboot distribution (coreboot distro), in the same way that Debian is a Linux distribution. Libreboot provides free, open source (libre) boot firmware based on coreboot, replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware on specific Intel/AMD x86 and ARM based motherboards, including laptop and desktop computers. It initialises the hardware (e.g. memory controller, CPU, peripherals) and starts a bootloader for your operating system (OS). Linux and BSD are well-supported.
Libreboot has, as of today, become an official member project within SPI, or more formally, Software in the Public Interest. Libreboot’s project page is here:
https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/libreboot/
Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit corporation in New York, which provides legal and fiscal infrastructure for Free Software projects. They assist projects in the handling of administrative tasks, money and so on, allowing those projects to focus on the thing that matters most: the code.
Organisations like SPI are vital for the health of the entire Free Software movement, and I’m extremely grateful to SPI for accepting Libreboot!
I contacted them earlier in 2025, around the time I attended FOSDEM 2025 in Belgium.
Here is the resolution from SPI’s board meeting on 14 July 2025, where Libreboot was officially accepted as a member project:
https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/2025/2025-07-14.js.1/
SPI holds their board meetings on IRC. Here is the public IRC log of the board meeting, in which the above resolution was accepted unanimously:
https://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/logs/2025/2025-07-14.txt
SPI then contacted me with their invitation, based on this resolution, and I accepted their invitation!
Going forward, I will be using Libreboot’s SPI membership for several things, such as:
- Accepting donations from the public, to provide funding for Libreboot; this includes things like research/development costs (buying hardware and equipment mostly, for porting to Libreboot and for testing).
- Paying for project expenses - I’ll likely start using it to pay for e.g. domain name renewals, hosting, and so on, in the future. I currently pay these expenses myself.
- Legal assistance; for example if Libreboot ever wants to use contractors in the future to work on things, that sort of thing. And of course, if Libreboot generally ever needs help with legal documents.
- In general, if the project ever has much larger expenses in the future, SPI can also manage whatever assets Libreboot needs it to.
SPI is one of the oldest fiscal sponsor organisations specifically for Free Software projects, and one of the biggest there is. For example, they sponsor the Debian Linux project!
Here are some examples of other, major Free Software projects that they support:
- https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/archlinux/
- https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/debian/
- https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/ffmpeg/
- https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/libreoffice/
- https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/openssl/
- https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/openzfs/
Libreboot is a lifelong passion of mine (I am its founder and lead developer), but the problem it has always had is that it’s basically just me; I rely heavily on help from the various upstream projects that Libreboot uses, and from contributors to Libreboot. A number of people have made major contributions to Libreboot over the years.
But the problem was always that Libreboot didn’t have formal infrastructure in place, until today. This, more generally, is why I sought to join SPI. I had considered creating my own Libreboot Foundation many years ago, and this is still a possibility, but it’s easier for a smaller project like Libreboot to lean on organisations like SPI instead.
So basically, where I once funded Libreboot entirely by my own means, SPI will now provide an official, organised way to do so - and I anticipate that this will mean Libreboot can gain greater funding and support as a result. I’m expecting great things! Libreboot always had a strong future, but SPI membership now makes that future even stronger.
At the time of this article, the SPI-based donations page for Libreboot has not yet been set up, but it will be online in the near future.
Once again, I would like to thank SPI for accepting Libreboot! Libreboot will be able to achieve great things, with SPI’s help, and I’m very much looking forward to the future.
Thank you! And to my readers: watch this space.
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