Let's get rid of all the binary blobs - GNU Mes

“Can you really speak of a program being free software if you cannot bootstrap it?”, says our guest Janneke. He is the founder of GNU Mes, a project addressing the security concerns that arise from bootstrapping an operating system using large, unauditable binary blobs.
GNU Mes helped to reduce the number and size of binary seeds that were used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0 by a factor ten from ~250 to ~25 MiB.
Janneke talks about working on GNU Mes, its community, NGI Zero funding and calls for a fifth freedom: Freedom Four. The freedom to build a program totally from source.
Links:
GNU Mes website
GNU Mes NGI Zero project page
GNU Mes RISC-V NGI Zero project page
GNU Lilypond

Four freedoms of Free Software
Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust
DOE040 the democratic school in Eindhoven

Other projects mentioned:
Stage0
Guix
Gash
live bootstrap with lfs

Blog posts on GNU Mes:
Janneke and Ludovic Courtès - April 26, 2023 The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down
Janneke — June 15, 2020 Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%
Janneke - October 8, 2019 Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by 50%

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet. You can find us on @NGIZero@mastodon.xyz & @nlnet@nlnet.nl. NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

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