“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%