Apertis v2024 released

Apertis is a Collabora-developedDebian derivative distribution designed to be incorporated into electronicdevices; the v2024release is now available. It is now based on the Bookworm release, andincludes support for Podman, ONNXRuntime, OP-TEE, and more.

Apertis relies on the Debian Free Software Guidelines to ensure allsoftware shipped is open source or, in limited cases, at leastfreely distributable. However, for some customers this is notenough to be able to adopt OSS solutions as in their evaluationssome provisions in common licenses like the GPL-3 are at odds withregulatory constraints they are subject to. Apertis does not set tosolve this decades-long debate, and instead its goal is to increasethe adoption of modern, maintained OSS solutions in markets wherethis has historically been a challenge. To enable this, Apertissupports avoiding the use of any software under some licenses (likethe [GPL v3.0 license family) on target images, while still makingthem fully available for development and for customers that do notshare those licensing concerns. To avoid these licenses, Apertisuses more modern alternatives instead of relying on outdated andunmaintained pre-GPL-3 versions. For instance, coreutils andfindutils (GPL-3+) are replaced in Apertis by rust-coreutils andrust-findutils.