On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 11:40:01AM -0400, Jay Sulzberger wrote: > But here are two headers of my argument: If we do not defend the > ground on which free software lives and grows, we will shortly > have no free software. Part of the ground is that we need ask no > permission of Microsoft, nor anybody else, to convenienetly use > any services provided by the hardware, services which under your > proposed plan will only be conveniently available to Microsoft. The only way to avoid asking permission of anyone is for secure boot to be disabled by default on all hardware. The problem with that is that vendors *want* secure boot. Some vendors are unhappy that Microsoft required that users be able to disable it on x86. So this isn't a Microsoft problem - it's an industry problem. So what would a solution look like? Since vendors want secure boot, we would obviously need to force the vendors to change their mind. There are two entities that are capable of doing so: 1) Microsoft. If Microsoft changed the Windows 8 requirements such that vendors *must* leave secure boot disabled by default we'd be fine. But then we'd be beholden to Microsoft again, and they could change their mind in future. Given what you've said, it sounds like you don't like this option. 2) Government. If a large enough set of national governments required that secure boot be disabled by default then we could assume that arbitrary hardware would work out of the box. It's unclear to me which laws you think the vendors would be breaking, but I'm not a lawyer. Microsoft may have started this movement, but they're not the only relevant entity in favour of it. -- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
