On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 4:21 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > That's fine as long as you speak English. Come on now, you're building a strawman argument. I never said that it had to be in a single language—notice messages I _normally_ write get put into many languages. I don't see why the text of the screen couldn't be outside the signed area so people could continue to develop it in an efficient manner. > But you've arbitrarily decided that the > freedom to do anything about that isn't one that you care about? There > are no easy answers here. You've just drawn your "This freedom is > worthwhile" line in a slightly different place to me. There isn't an easy answer here because you've defined a higher goal then just getting information to people. The goal you've set—Fedora working out of the box on this hardware without user fuss—can't be accomplished via technical means, except by restricting the bootloader and kernel. There is no law of nature which says that this must be your goal, however. When it comes down to it, your "drawing the line" argument just doesn't make sense. There is always injustice in the world. If you want to be pedantic, anyone who ever seeks a more lawful or more ethical path is simply "drawing a line", because there is always some more fundamental injustice they've left unsolved for the moment. We have an operating system where the users can modify it—top to bottom—and distribute the results, and have them just as able to be used as Fedora itself is, where they all stand sharing with each other as technological equals without having to ask permission. This freedom is both an ethical stance, embodied in the vision of the Fedora project and in the licenses of the many thousands of free software packages Fedora ships, and also a competitive advantage, because this kind of freedom is precluded by the the business models of Apple and Microsoft. This isn't just the practical advantage of being able to twiddle with our own machines, but also the advantage of having a cooperative ecosystem rather than a co-opting ecosystem. But with this change, for the majority of users, Fedora will become a lot more like Microsoft's offering—a locked kernel which you can load userspace apps on top of— which you can "jailbreak" to get more freedom. This is practically a twenty-year step backwards in software freedom, a loss of a practical advantage of our software, and an affront to the developers of copylefted software—some written as a direct attack on these kinds of restrictions. And it is the loss of a strong principled position which we have used to market free software: that the concept of jailbreaking is foreign to us because we don't, as a matter of principle and of license compliance, restrict our users. There are places where the freedoms provided by Fedora have practical limits—and in those places we find people arguing to advance those causes (such as preemptively renaming trademarked packages). But that in no way excuses a new loss of freedom; if it is to be justified, it must stand on its own merits. These merits must be judged not against the weakest strawmen, but against the best alternatives. A signed help screen is an alternative. Fedora installs are easier than they were ten years ago when you did have to frequently mess with the BIOS—and where the failures never had a nice help screen—but being realistic, our install instructions still have people raw-writing images to usb sticks, and it is still not that uncommon to have to muck around in the BIOS to get the boot order right. A totally clueless person with an install disk can easily wipe out a system full of their data. I think regressing to the installs being somewhat easier than ten yearsish ago is still a better place to be than the cryptographic lockdown. Why not try the half step— a restricted help screen display module— and only go the whole way if it proves inadequate? -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
