On Fri, 2012-06-15 at 12:05 -0400, Jay Sulzberger wrote: > In the case of ARM devices Microsoft's statement of its position > is different: If the ARM device is shipped with a Microsoft OS, > then Fedora will never be installed on the device. No putting > one's own key in, no getting a special > Microsoft/Vendor/Certificate-Authority managed key for the whole > Fedora project, no nothing, just gross suppression of Fedora and > all free OSes. I'm not sure that kind of language is really helpful to anyone. Locked devices are what they are. They exist and have for years. Everything is getting more blurred now, given that it's perfectly possible for a microwave oven or wristwatch to have enough power to qualify it as a 'personal computer' by 1980s standards, and very few of them permit easy use of arbitrary code. Cellphones and tablets are personal computers in all sorts of ways; ditto with them, there has never been any kind of convention in those products that the user should be granted easy access to running arbitrary software, and they almost invariably are not. It just is what it is. You can choose to draw a somewhat arbitrary position that all computing devices have to allow ultimate control to their users and refuse to use any that don't, if you really insist. But it seems a bit of a quixotic 'cause' to take up. The open nature of the x86 PC architecture is to a large extent a historical accident more than the result of some sort of great ideological conviction, and the results of trying to graft ideological convictions on to it after the fact seem, to me, slightly forced and unconvincing. So, look. A Windows RT device is going to be just like just about any cellphone or tablet - a device which can be used for many of the purposes for which we're accustomed to using x86-based PCs, with much more restriction on user freedom than x86-based PCs have usually had. If that's not a thing you want, then you're free not to buy one. I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone buy one for the purpose of installing another operating system on it; that'd be silly (except, of course, in cases where particularly compelling implementations turn out to be trivially easy to unlock/root, which is often the case with Android phones). But I find it really difficult to truly believe that the mere existence of such devices is in itself inherently evil or wrong. There's no particular deception or duplicity going on. No-one is telling people they'll easily be able to execute arbitrary code on such devices. You go in with your eyes open, you know what you're getting, and you can choose whether it's something you want to participate in or not. If you don't, well, don't. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
