[Savannah-hackers-public] Project evaluation for librebootreborn

[Asher Gordon]

Hello,

It seems to me that it would be better to post my evaluation directly on
the tracker, but HowToBecomeASavannahHacker¹ says I should send it here
instead. Perhaps there is a reason for that.

I started using Savannah to host software about two years ago, which is
when I first started publishing free software. My Savannah account name
is AsDaGo. I'm sending in my evaluation of the librebootreborn project
submission, which is task #15964.²

This is my first project evaluation, so please bear with me through any
mistakes I might make.

The source tarball linked in the project submission seems to include a
lot of third party sources which are automatically downloaded. It is my
understanding that these won't be included in the source code
repository, and shouldn't be evaluated under Savannah's requirements. As
such, I have instead evaluated the 5 git repositories listed here:³
lbmk,⁴ lbwww,⁵ lbwww-img,⁶ bucts,⁷ and ich9utils.⁸ Due to the large
number of files, I was not able to manually check each file separately
but instead used tools like licensecheck and good ol' find and grep.

In this project, "Linux" appears only to refer to the kernel, or as
"GNU+Linux" or "GNU/Linux" when referring to the entire operating
system. lbmk/README.md contains the line

Libreboot is a *Free Software* project, but can be considered Open Source.

but then immediately follows up with

[The GNU 
website](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html)
teaches why you should call it Free Software instead; alternatively, you may
call it libre software.

so I believe this is a valid use of "Open Source" which promotes Free
Software instead. lbwww/site/news/rms.md (and the various translations)
also contain several instances of "Open Source", but again, always in a
way that promotes Free Software.

As for the license notices, there are several files that don't contain
them. However, most of these seem to be automatically generated (such as
lbmk/resources/seabios/config/libgfxinit) or trivial (such as
lbmk/projectname). Most of the *.md files in lbwww have no license
notices, but probably should. (Not sure if the lbwww repository is going
to be hosted on Savannah though.) None of the .gitignore files have
license notices. bucts/.gitignore is trivial, but it's probably best to
add a license notice to the others. (Again, not sure what repositories
are going to end up being hosted on Savannah.) Finally, bucts/Makefile
should probably have a license notice.

Aside from the license notice issues, everything else looks good.

I hope this saves you some time!

Thanks,
Asher


Footnotes:
¹  https://savannah.nongnu.org/maintenance/HowToBecomeASavannahHacker/

²  https://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?15964

³  https://libreboot.org/git.html

⁴  https://notabug.org/libreboot/lbmk

⁵  https://notabug.org/libreboot/lbwww

⁶  https://notabug.org/libreboot/lbwww-img

⁷  https://notabug.org/libreboot/bucts

⁸  https://notabug.org/libreboot/ich9utils

-- 
<cas> well there ya go.  say something stupid in irc and have it
      immortalised forever in someone's .sig file

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