On Jun 16, 2012, at 5:44 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Or, perhaps, they would have found themselves behind the gun-sights
of
the DOJ again and dropped the whole thing in order to avoid years of
costly antitrust litigation. (Or do you think they would have backed
off at all, just because someone asked, if they didn't think that risk
was at least somewhat credible?)
Calls for speculation. We know what the certification policy used to be. We also know how
long DOJ takes to do anything, let alone politicking behind the scenes to arrive at
compromise, let alone its day in court. Years. Generations of computers without a disable
feature.
No, but in the view of a handful, it's better for the entire community to experience
this pain, for years, in order to arrive at some asinine conclusion that XXXXXX is the
source of all evil in the computing world. Then all would be right as rain, unified tribal
behavior against an enemy that some people thought could be negotiated with.
This handful are the people who use adversarial words like: fight, war, battle, attack,
surrender, engagement, tactical, etc. to describe this topic. This verbiage is the
hallmark of propaganda, designed to cause emotive reactions in people, so they don't
consider inconvenient things like facts.
Certainly people who are of the opinion that Fedora shouldn't run on
devices that need signed kernels aren't going to be convinced that
gaining the ability to make that choice was a big improvement.
Oh, the same people who must think boot loader malware is somewhere in the continuum of
people's imaginations to being exclusively a Windows threat.
The Windows 8 certification is the most significant change in Microsoft's hardware
requirements ever, as far as I can tell. It's a significant departure from their
"support legacy at most any cost" position prior to this. Clearly they are more
than a bit concerned about boot loader malware than they are gaining, what, 1%, by
obliterating the entirety of desktop Linux with this conspiracy.
Chris Murphy