But why? What is this all about?

We believe that everyone deserves the freedom to study, alter and improve technology, to use it freely without restriction. The goal is identical to that of the Free Software Foundation, which is to ensure that everything you need to do on a computer can be done exclusively with free software.

also has many practical advantages over proprietary boot firmware, such as faster boot speeds and better security. Since the source code is public and fully auditable, malicious features such as backdoors (common in proprietary firmware) are unlikely to exist. You can install GNU/Linux with encrypted /boot/, configure it to only boot kernels signed with your GPG key, run a full operating system directly from the flash chip (coming soon!), and more.

Contributing to libreboot?

The instructions at download/#contrib show how to submit patches. The list of currently defined tasks is listed at gitdocs/release.html#tasks. The gitdocs/ directory is also part of the git repository (it's a symlink to a working repository), so you can also submit patches adding to that list of tasks.