Dramacow Leah Rowe / Francis Rowe / libreleah - Drama whore founder of the Libreboot project, blogged their dick inversion, feuded with Stallman

[CIA Nigger]

Leah Rowe (Deadname: Francis Rowe) is an open source software developer, commie trans activist, and founder of the Libreboot project who got into an internet fight with Richard Stallman and blogged their dick inversion. For a few years, he seemed like just another low profile open source developer and before he came out as a tranny in 2016 it seemed he was somewhat mentally sound. Once he came out as a tranny, he completely went off the rails. Within the span of a few months he’d drag the FSF, the community around his project, his project, and his reputation through the mud on a never ending rollercoaster of insanity fueled by drugs and HRT.

Spoiler: Transition Timeline

The Libreboot Project drama
So first here’s some background on what Libreboot is. Libreboot is a project to develop a free and open source BIOS (or boot firmware) replacement, based on the coreboot project. Essentially when you turn your computer on, it would load this instead of whatever BIOS normally ran on your computer. It wasn’t ported to many devices besides a few Lenovo thinkpads and some old motherboards for several reasons including the lack of hardware support and its inability to support anything relatively new. Despite this, Libreboot found a following among the extremely paranoid types who wanted a device with a completely free software stack down to the BIOS level and Richard Stallman himself. Coreboot (which Libreboot was based on) was also for a time a high priority FSF project and laptops sold with it were given the FSF Respects Your Freedom seal of approval.

During these first few years Francis was fairly low profile with regards to drama, essentially being just another FOSS dev with a hardon for the FSF and Richard Stallman. He even managed to help the Libreboot project become an official GNU project, putting libreboot alongside high profile and quality projects like Gnome, Gimp, Emacs, GCC, and more. From May 2016 to September 2016, the project was called GNU Libreboot. An interview with him from right before he came out focused solely on the project, with nothing about the man behind the project.

Then in May 2016, something big happened. Francis Rowe came out as a true and honest transwoman and changed his name to Leah Rowe.

I remember when /tech/ heard about this (sadly there are no archives because there are no 8chan archive sites like 4chan has) the reaction was divided between “Libreboot is dead” and “Who cares if she’s a tranny, as long as they don’t fuck the project up”. A few short months later, it’s obvious which side called it correctly.

September 16, 2016 is when Leah Rowe completely lost it. That’s when one of his tranny friends got fired from the FSF. Leah Rowe’s reasonable reaction was to completely throw a tantrum online starting out on the mailing list.

Spoiler

https://archive.fo/rBeTK
Leah's reasoning for this? Harassment by cis white males.

https://archive.fo/7cXtw

Leah then went into overdrive, making the libreboot website into an HRT fueled soap box ranting about the FSF and Richard Stallman, and naming people he wanted fired from the FSF in response to this. These posts were updated as the events played out.

Spoiler

https://archive.fo/q5uod
Initially the FSF refused to let them leave the project but they later did.

https://archive.fo/AgiBt
Leah then made a rant about how projects should never join the FSF, with the most notable part being his rant about Stallman:

https://archive.fo/GAtiI

During this shitstorm this led to RMS himself having to make an official statement, saying gender didn’t matter to their employment which led to more screeching from Leah.

https://archive.fo/1Ywba
Perhaps the most damning post was from a libreboot developer, Damien Zammit, who made a post calling out Leah’s unprofessionalism:

Spoiler

https://archive.fo/8XVZz

Leah's response?

https://archive.fo/q5uod
Keep in mind, Damien talks about being paid, something we'll get to later.

Eventually the shitstorm ended up on Linux news sites like Phoronix:

https://archive.fo/ScaHs

The project seemed to die down for a bit, and most likely there was some behind the scenes drama (along with drama relating to money which will be the next section) but it all came to a conclusion in April of 2017. On April 1st, the website was redirected to “leahboot”, a website that was intended as satire but also seemed to reflect the state of the project as it was. With the state of the Libreboot project and how it was run, it teetered between feminist software foundation type satire and something Leah would have done unironically.

The next day, Leah officially apologized for the last few months, let others have control of the project as well (without fully giving it up), and the project was back to normal for the most part. The website is focused on Libreboot and Libreboot only, and has nothing to do with Leah Rowe anymore for the most part. An open letter was posted on the libreboot website. Of note, it mentions that Leah has a drug problem.

Spoiler

https://archive.fo/b0sXa

But that doesn’t mean the Leah Rowe saga came to a conclusion.

Leah and Business: Minifree and debt
Leah Rowe runs a business called Minifree. They sell librebooted laptops for high prices. For less money you could buy the same exact laptops on eBay (they’re ex lease Core 2 Duo era laptops anyhow) but already librebooted and loaded with Linux. Unlike Libreboot, this is Leah’s business, and it shows on the website. Above the storefront is a giant notice about their surgery, and stating orders will be delayed because of it.

https://archive.fo/816vX

Leah Rowe has had some issues with his business. For starters, he owes people including Raptor Engineering $90,000 after he promised to pay them to develop libreboot ports and never paid for them. In January 2017 (a few months before the open letter was published), Raptor Engineering posted on the Coreboot mailing list about Leah’s non-payment, to which Leah decided to throw a tantrum, throwing personal attacks at the owner and making up excuses for not paying. Leah’s reason for not paying the money he owed? Apparently the board had issues with Libreboot and RAM support. Since the full debt amount was mentioned in the surgery fundraiser, I'll assume Leah later decided to pay it off.

Spoiler

The exchange begins when Timothy replies to an old thread talking about the porting process.

https://archive.fo/Pl06p
Timothy's next posts go more in depth on the port:

https://archive.fo/zXBSc

https://archive.fo/D1dMp

https://archive.fo/9BNbz
While Timothy decides to take the high road and avoid dragging drama longer than it needs to go, Leah does not take the hint:

https://archive.fo/vOpuu

https://archive.fo/NxEGh
The fight really gets spicy when the personal attacks start:

https://archive.fo/I4hy9

https://archive.fo/aucVx

Leah also got into a fight with another FOSS laptop seller also selling overpriced flashed Thinkpads over on the Trisquel forums. It started out as a fight between Leah and Technoethical before fully turning into a full-fledged flamewar, topping off when Technoethical unknowingly took advantage of Leah’s weakness: Posting emails with his deadname in the address and name area. The flamewar involved Leah bragging about his accomplishments including the $90,000 owed to Raptor Engineering and dirt on them being brought up in the thread, including accusations of impersonation and being caught “sliding” threads by posting in other threads to bump that thread off the recently posted threads.

Spoiler

The thread starts out very civil, then Leah comes in to ask about patches for Libreboot on the T400s. From there, the thread nosedives very quickly:

Towards the bottom of page 1, words fly.

By Page 2, the thread becomes an all out shitshow. There is so much comedy gold on this that I'll just get the cream of the crop in these screencaps.

This is the best post on the thread IMO. This is where Leah gets accidentally deadnamed and gets extremely angry on the internet:

Leah sees this, chimps, and gets told to calm down. Notably Leah also gets angry at being outed despite saying they're a proud tranny on their homepage.

Leah's tard wrangler then steps in and tells him and the other guy to knock it off.

As for the sliding:

Thread archive:
https://archive.fo/lUX0I (Page 1)
https://archive.fo/Lyip4 (Page 2)
https://archive.fo/ejBRv (Page 3)
https://archive.fo/Oj1rB (Page 4)

Leah’s blog and the crowdfunded neovagina

2018 is when Leah came back into the limelight for a different reason entirely. Leah decided to do two things. The first thing on Leah’s list was to turn that dick into a neovagina, but there’s one issue: Leah is broke. Leah is not only in debt $90,000 from Raptor Engineering porting Libreboot to more motherboards, but also an additional $4,000 from Damien Zammit porting Libreboot as well. Leah absolutely has to have a neovagina, and can’t stand those gatekeeping NHS bigots imposing wait times. Leah’s solution was to crowdfund it and he succeeded.

Spoiler

https://archive.fo/XRfUT

Leah also begged for donations on the minifree website and when he got his new vagina, announced orders were going to be delayed.

https://archive.fo/TMQlx

https://archive.fo/5cTLH

However that wasn’t the best part. Leah decided to start a blog, and while the first few posts were boring as shit drawn out vlogs with absolutely nothing of note, except for where he left proprietary software open by accident during a vlog…

(Video mirror: https://my.mixtape.moe/vnynso.webm)
(Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180906191654/https://blog.vimuser.org/episode0000.html)
…Leah decided to take posting pictures of neovaginas online for attention to the next level. Leah made a blog post about his sex reassignment surgery to the point of posting pictures of every step in the process that his surgeon took. (Archive: WARNING YOU WILL REGRET CLICKING THIS)

Spoiler: some of the text on the page

/r/drama and imageboards reacted the same way Kiwi Farms did to Phil’s stink ditch posts, with disgust and “what the fuck” replies.

Spoiler

https://archive.fo/w9w9q

https://archive.fo/atRnG (warning has a surgery pic as the OP image)

Leah has decided to make blogging his side hobby now, first starting with some blog post about how he is pro-brexit (only if the leftists do it though), and then how JK Rowling is a fascist (despite pandering to the woke crowd). Leah then made a hilarious blog post about fully automated luxury space communism, how the USSR was a great nation that just worked, and how communism will rise again. The posts from them are loaded with comedy gold, with the communism one being loaded with crazy from start to finish. For example in his EU post:

But the communism one is just hilarious:

Trans Activism
While this isn’t as noteworthy as Leah’s personal life or the Libreboot saga, Leah Rowe runs a transgender activism website called Transit. The website mostly consists of stuff copy/pasted from other trans activism websites and links to them, and links to IRC chats, but of note are the pages that let one see into Leah’s beliefs.

The website has a manifesto which goes into detail about how trannies should be socialists, that trannies should be able to get life changing surgery the minute they want it, that dodgy surgeons are okay, and that they should be able to take however much HRT they want to take.

Spoiler

Furthermore, the website pushes for DIY transitioning (where you take HRT yourself that you buy online illegally) and has guides on how to buy it online.

Accounts and Websites
Since Leah is a stallmanite to the point of posting links to Stallman's blog on one of his blog posts, he does not use many social media accounts, but he does own multiple websites.

Reddit: libreleah (Archive: https://archive.fo/ohEER)
Tranny activism website: www.transit.org.uk (Archive: https://archive.fo/5eMQ7)
Personal site: www.vimuser.org (Archive: https://archive.fo/TJKgo)
Blog: blog.vimuser.org (Archive: https://archive.fo/oAnJd)
Trisquel Forum account: libreleah (Archive: https://archive.fo/Sombl)
Raddle account (some reddit clone): libreleah (Archive: https://archive.fo/XJ82r)
Leah's business: Minifree.org (https://archive.fo/TMQlx)

Dox
19 Hilton Rd
Canvey Island
Essex
SS8 9QA
DOB November 4, 1991 (age 26)

 

[The Fool]

I never even heard of libreboot, I mistook it for Open Firmware and got sad because Open Firmware is cool. Glad to see I was mistaken. Even back in my full-on-freetard days I never understood replacing your BIOS, that's just begging to brick your motherboard. You gotta be actually schizophrenic to want to do that.

I feel bad for Stallman, he's almost Terry-tier and honestly deserves a thread himself, but he doesn't deserve raging faggots like this, and unfortunately he's getting more and more batshit people like this yelling at him these days. At least he knows how to ignore them.

 

[Clones of Alex Jones]

I wonder if Leah will join La Zorra

 

[AF 802]

I love how rms, despite being a lolcow himself, even realizes how retarded Leah is. It's great.

I just wonder why FOSS people have to go to the lengths of replacing the BIOS, irreversibly that is....

 

[Incredible Crisis]

Why do so many genius male programmers end up going crazy and having a dramatic troonout? There's at least a half a dozen thoroughly documented cases of this happening. They let this obsession take over their lives.

 

[The Fool]

I just wonder why FOSS people have to go to the lengths of replacing the BIOS, irreversibly that is....

Most FOSS supporters are practical idealists who are just following a simple philosophy, and are perfectly fine with having as much as reasonably possible open software, being aware that games and the BIOS are fine as they are. People like Francis here are proper freetards and are indistinguishable from communists (probably why so many of them are communist). They have such an extremist outlook on software being open source that they advocate for proprietary software being outright illegal.

Why do so many genius male programmers end up going crazy and having a dramatic troonout? There's at least a half a dozen thoroughly documented cases of this happening. They let this obsession take over their lives.

lol I wouldn't call writing a BIOS "genius". It definitely requires some autism, but there's not that much thinking involved in writing one. They're intentionally small, simple APIs over some microcode. I'd reserve "genius programmer" for people who can actually engineer platforms and algorithms like Terry did.

 

[CIA Nigger]

I just wonder why FOSS people have to go to the lengths of replacing the BIOS, irreversibly that is....

The FSF view of BIOSes and firmware is if it's burned into the hardware and can't be modified, it's hardware. If it can be user flashed it's software and that means it has to be FOSS as well. Most people don't give a shit about this, but the overly paranoid types online are vocal about this.

lol I wouldn't call writing a BIOS "genius". It definitely requires some autism, but there's not that much thinking involved in writing one. They're intentionally small, simple APIs over some microcode. I'd reserve "genius programmer" for people who can actually engineer platforms and algorithms like Terry did.

Leah didn't even write much of it, it came from the Coreboot project. That was the original project started when the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory wanted a BIOS that'd start up crazy fast and made it open source. Eventually RMS decided he needed a laptop with that and so they installed it on a Thinkpad T22 for him.

Libreboot's main accomplishments were distributing it prebuilt and with the binary blobs removed. A lot of it was done by the coreboot project or by paid porters like Raptor Engineering.

 

[jebsurge]

Libreboot and Minifree are wasted potential to the point that it's kind of sad.

 

[Tha Promblems]

I was aware of Libreboot, being a card carrying neckbeard (ThinkPad running Linux and all), I knew the Libreboot founder was trans, but the depth of her audacity was completely unknown to me. Why can these people never take responsibility? Why does everything have to revolve around how special and trans they are?

Free software is cool and all, but if you think you can get out of the prying eye of (any) government, you're sorely optimistic. FOSS BIOS isn't going to do anything for you besides get you brownie points in the FOSS community.

 

[Trombonista]

You'd think someone with gender dysphoria wouldn't want to have photos taken of their presurgery genitals.

 

[Incredible Crisis]

You'd think someone with gender dysphoria wouldn't want to have photos taken of their presurgery genitals.

A dick is a proprietary accessory of the male sex, unnecessary for the functioning of the free, open source transsexual woman.

This is also another example of someone who makes poor economic decisions and instead of examining their own career choices, decide to blame the foundations of capitalism. Lady, if you want to install communism then read the terms of service first.

 

[byuu]

Why do so many genius male programmers end up going crazy and having a dramatic troonout?

Leah seems barely capable of programming. I looked up her commits in the last few years and it was almost all documentation and code formatting, except for a few lines of simple shell script here and there.

Has she ever actually touched C code for more than correcting a typo in some string?

 

[CIA Nigger]

You'd think someone with gender dysphoria wouldn't want to have photos taken of their presurgery genitals.

Well they are biologically male, and everyone knows what biological males love to do: take pictures of their genitals. Women tend to show off their tits more than they do their vagina.

Leah seems barely capable of programming. I looked up her commits in the last few years and it was almost all documentation and code formatting, except for a few lines of simple shell script here and there.

Has she ever actually touched C code for more than correcting a typo in some string?

Pretty much this, much of the work was done by the Coreboot devs, other Libreboot devs, and paid porters.

 

[GandT]

Dox
19 Hilton Rd
Canvey Island
Essex
SS8 9QA

Ah, well this explains a lot.

To those not in the know, Canvey is an island in the Thames estuary, although mostly only separated from the mainland by creeks. Even so, it's long been a running joke in Essex that because of this the island is a hotbed of inbreeding and the general weirdness that you associate with isolated communities.

Looks like there may be some truth to the joke...

 

[Plissken]

HOLY SHIT! When did that witch from Robin Hood: Men in Tights have a sister? An even uglier sister at that.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

For somebody who professes to love communism and be a communist, he sure was eager to jump the queue of his nationalized, state funded and free at point of use health care service to get his self-mutilation surgery with money cash upfront to a privatized, capitalist medical product.

 

[AnOminous]

For somebody who professes to love communism and be a communist, he sure was eager to jump the queue of his nationalized, state funded and free at point of use health care service to get his self-mutilation surgery with money cash upfront to a privatized, capitalist medical product.

Like most so-called commies, he wants communism for you, while he gets iPhones and troon surgery hatchet jobs and all the benefits of capitalism. These commies assume they're going to be party elite, not the prole on the street.

 

[CIA Nigger]

Today in shit Leah says, the fashion industry doesn't cater to nonbinary people and enforces the gender binary. Fucking bigots.

https://archive.fo/XSX5N

Leah also posted an unoriginal analysis about how the Matrix is some troon story, theories that didn't pop up until the directors trooned the fuck out. There's so much comedy gold I spoilered it so it doesn't eat up page space.

Spoiler

https://archive.fo/oyXvQ

Like most so-called commies, he wants communism for you, while he gets iPhones and troon surgery hatchet jobs and all the benefits of capitalism. These commies assume they're going to be party elite, not the prole on the street.

They also believe that under communism EVERYONE is going to get iPhones, free HRT and tranny surgeries, and the most advanced technology and healthcare. Even though communist countries for the most part just copied off the west and oftentimes did it poorly.

 

[VoreDoggy]

This thread is probably gonna be easier to follow than his intentionally shit blog.

 

[Done]

@CIA Nigger Top notch OP. I have to say, this troon reminds me a lot of Thorne Melcher, most certainly in terms of looks: