Exactly my thoughts. The only good news I read is RedHat's boot loader
will only load grub2, which can then be used to launch other free
operating systems, and not just RedHat's.
Still, Secure Boot will now be enabled by default on all devices, and
only a hidden setting turns it off.
Evil. Just evil.
The Freedombox project could surely use everybody's support who's
outraged by this. Google "freedombox" if you don't know about it. It's
a design to get a completely free software stack running on a tiny
server about the size of a cell phone, and for less than $50 when
complete. The idea is to have millions of these little servers running
outside the regular Internet.
Best regards,
Rick C. Hodgin
On 06/01/2012 12:49 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I read today that RedHat will pay Microsofot to make sure their
operating systems are able to boot with the upcoming Secure Boot that
Microsoft may or may not require OEMs to have:
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/redhat-will-pay-microsoft-to-ensure-fedora-18-runs-on-windows-8-pcs-2012061/
With this in mind, it would suck if operating systems will require
payment to Microsoft to be able to install with Secure Boot in place.
How would this affect community distros like Debian, Slackware and
Arch? If that is the case, would Canonical pay Microsoft for Ubuntu? I
say this because Trisquel is based off of Ubuntu and their payment
towards it would then hopefully affect Trisquel due to the shared code
base.
I am aware that there are companies like Think Penguin and System76
that think about GNU/Linux support as their main concern, but Secure
Boot affects the average consumer who buys a computer from a store or
a retailer like Dell.
Let's just hope Stallman doesn't have another heart attack if this is
the way of computing from now on.
