Re: [OT] Re: the ghost of UEFI and Micr0$0ft
On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:52:22 +0530, Harshad Joshi wrote:
>>
>> i was reading this article - http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html
>>
>> It is written by someone related to redhat and it describes implementing
>> UEFI secure boot in Fedora Core.
>
> Ah, yes. I read about it recently in some Spanish tech magazine...
>
> IMO, Fedora did *the wrong thing* (since when blindly following what
> Microsoft -or any other company- does is the correct way to achieve a
> milestone?) in *the wrong way* (by not counting with the whole open
> source community support, or at least the other linux distributions,
> before taking such a decision).
>
> Of course, they're not committed to give explanations on what they do nor
> how they do, but neither makes a favor to the FLOSS community :-/
It's easy to criticize Fedora but what would you have liked them to
do? They published a white paper [1] with Ubuntu last October in
response to Microsoft's Secure Boot plans. Where were the other
distributions pre-the-white-paper? Where were the other distributions
post-the-white-paper? Was there an official statement from Debian,
even post-the-white-paper, to the effect that "this is a bad
development, we're going to work with Red Hat and Canonical to fight
it"?
The other distributions only have themselves to blame if Fedora's
ended up going its own way. I wonder what happened to Ubuntu
post-the-white-paper; it's even more bizarre than the other
distributions not making any kind of statement or seemingly not
getting involved in fighting for Linux, given that like Fedora, Ubuntu
has a new release in October/November that'll have take Secure Boot
into account. Also, I suspect that had Debian's participation been
raised on debian-devel, the flame war would have ended after F18 and
U12.10 had been published (witness the never-ending "discussions" on
replacing sysvinit that have been going on, intermittently, since last
summer).
For those of us who want to dual-, triple-, ...-boot Windows, want to
boot from a Live CD, want to compile their own kernels, want to use
kernel modules not included in their distribution (assuming that the
distribution can boot using Secure Boot), ..., we have to thank Fedora
for working to change the spec to allow Linux to boot using Secure
boot.
It's horrible that we'll have to go through Microsoft to boot Linux
using Secure Boot but it leveraged its dominance and power to suit
itself (at least in the desktop field, because in the server field,
where Linux has a far more substantial presence, there's no such
requirement, AFAIU). Looking at it objectively, Microsoft has
manoeuvered skillfully. It would've liked to lock down x86 in the same
way that it locked down ARM but knew that it would open itself to
legal problems so it compromised.
Lastly, Fedora's position isn't set in stone - at least not
officially- because FESCO has yet to sign off on the Garrett/Jones
plan (although it's a fair bet that it'll be approved). Its biggest
strength is that those who are opposed to Secure Boot can simply turn
it off!
1. http://blog.canonical.com/2011/10/28/white-paper-secure-boot-impact-on-linux/
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