systemd-boot is a free and open-source boot manager created by obsoleting the gummiboot project and merging it into systemd in May 2015.

[1][2][3][4] gummiboot was developed by the Red Hat employees Kay Sievers and Harald Hoyer and designed as a minimal alternative to GNU GRUB for systems using the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

[5] As a word play, the name "gummiboot" means "rubber (inflatable) boat" in German, the native language of its initial developers.

[6] Despite being developed by two of its employees, Red Hat's Fedora Project did not use gummiboot for booting UEFI systems; instead, it used efilinux to chainload GRUB.

This distinction was intended to allow gummiboot to be suitable for use on UEFI systems implementing secure boot,[6] due to concerns surrounding its requirement to distribute all authorization keys (digital certificates) needed to run GPL-v3-licensed software if hardware restrictions such as secure boot are in effect.