I don't believe a UEFI secure boot proposal is a bad thing for the community, at least on the face of it so to speak. I agree with some previous discussions I have read the past couple of days, that it has to be as "painless" as possible for the "average Joe/Jane" user. Also, for those who don't want it, just don't enable it! I really don't see the problem there.
As for Microsoft, they are a very large corporation, who commands the PC user OS market. The hardware vendors cater to MS since they are the predominant OS used by most. Not to mention all of their other offerings, in the user SW area. OK nothing new said there. What I would like to say about MS is more about this community than them anyway, and that is... It is good to have a healthy paranoia towards MS motives and dealings with us. Although I don't see secure boot as any form of compromise in the FOSS community, I do see it as a potential step in a direction that may limit our freedom of choice. So keep questioning what this means to us in the open source community, and be on your guard for the inevitable caveat that MS will throw at us (think IBM and OS/2 days). MS after all has to produce profits for their investors, likely has a MANY year plan of where they want to be in the market, no doubt has a strategy for dealing with the open source community, and likely its desired demise. It is important to remember that the word "free" is a four letter word in the business community.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at nvidia. Ex-biologist. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon and Bluesky.
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UEFI, Microsoft, and Paranoia
Date: 2012-06-08 01:53 pm (UTC)As for Microsoft, they are a very large corporation, who commands the PC user OS market. The hardware vendors cater to MS since they are the predominant OS used by most. Not to mention all of their other offerings, in the user SW area. OK nothing new said there. What I would like to say about MS is more about this community than them anyway, and that is... It is good to have a healthy paranoia towards MS motives and dealings with us. Although I don't see secure boot as any form of compromise in the FOSS community, I do see it as a potential step in a direction that may limit our freedom of choice. So keep questioning what this means to us in the open source community, and be on your guard for the inevitable caveat that MS will throw at us (think IBM and OS/2 days). MS after all has to produce profits for their investors, likely has a MANY year plan of where they want to be in the market, no doubt has a strategy for dealing with the open source community, and likely its desired demise. It is important to remember that the word "free" is a four letter word in the business community.