Re: EFI in Debian
On Sun, 8 Jul 2012, Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:
> > The distinction is between x86 and ARM, and the Windows 8 cert
> > requirements for ARM appear to have as their goal to prevent any other
> > OS to be bootable on that hardware.
>
> Which is pretty outrageous IMHO and may well become a serious problem
> once PC-like ARM hardware becomes widely available (laptops and
> capable tablets). It is very disappointing that once they agreed to
> free-up x86 everyone said, 'oh that's alright then', failing to
> appreciate that ARM hardware will (likely) be just as ubiquitous as
> x86 quite soon. Hopefully enough people will produce hardware that
> isn't crippled in this way, but if Windows 8 is a popular platform one
> may get a greatly restricited choice.
I expect that by most metrics Android phones outsell PCs nowadays (largely
because phone contracts encourage replacement every 2 years and some portion
of the phones break before then). A significant portion of the Android phones
sold are locked down such that you can't change which version of the kernel
you run and can't get root access in any reasonable manner.
The iPhone has a comparable market volume to Android phones and is uniformly
locked down.
In terms of making ARM systems less free it doesn't seem to me that the MS
initiative in this regard is making things much worse than they are at the
moment.
Also it should be noted that while porting Linux to an ARM device designed for
Windows (such as a Windows phone) would probably take a lot of work it's
relatively easy to get your own Linux build on an Android phone if it's not
locked down.
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