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(a)srcf.ucam.org