Stallman

xz-utils

I'm something of a proprietary blob myself.
- You should open sauce!
  
  You can get my source code but good luck compiling it.
  
  Ayy, not that fast, their blob is licensed under the BSL, get to know them a while first

something something snap package
- Not a proprietary blob unless you install proprietary software
  
  I'm mentioning the "proprietary backend" drama around snaps. Not that I care too much, anyway. I use lots of proprietary software daily

Ventoy?
- From the Ventoy developers: the blobs are getting unblobbed.
  
  i been waiting for this so long
  
  There is also a new community fork to get rid of the blobs and bad cert loading. The ventroy dev has made a bunch of concerning choices so some people hard forked the code. I forgot where is was though.
  
  oh wow that really put the trust back into Ventoy. Nice! Thanks for the link
  
  Took them over a year to say anything? I have since just gone back to burning single drives and honestly it's fine. Ventoy was convenient but taking a year to respond to a genuine concern is crazy.
- just started using this for the first time, Is it still ok to use?
  
  Yes, but people have concerns. Ventoy is fully open-source, but the build process pulls binary blobs (compiled executables, think of them like blob chips) from other F/OSS projects, which is an issue for some people. They have legitimate concerns about trusting Ventoy because they have to implicitly trust the projects that Ventoy pulls from but can't verify what is getting pulled. If such a project were to become compromised (the way XZ-Utils was), it would eventually spread to Ventoy.
  That being said, the developers (or singular developer, not sure) are taking steps to reduce Ventoy's dependency on external blobs. It's a difficult task and they have limited resources, but they have acknowledged that it is an issue and are working on a solution.
  
  Yea it's fine.
  From memory the blob everyone was complaining about was related to eufi and came from Fedora.
- Just open source blobs instead of proprietary blobs
- Off topic, but I'd never heard of Ventoy before and looking at it now, holy shit, I wish I'd known about it sooner.

And here I am, marking unfree software as installable as the first thing I do on any distro.
- It's good that it's opt in
  
  Oh, agreed. There are definitely people who can live without unfree software. Me, I can't do without Steam and Lutris.
  
  The NixOS default config has allowUnfree set to false, so it's not always opt-in
- I love OSS but I won’t sacrifice my experience just to go fully libre. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. I’m glad it’s an option for people who do want that though
- I'll absolutely take FLOSS if I can get it, but failing that, FOSS is still a nice improvement over closed-source software.
  
  What does the L stand for