FSF Campaign against Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 06:00:41PM +0200, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
>
> On Oct 25, 2011, at 5:55 PM, Baruch Siach wrote:
>
>> Hi Amit,
>>
>> The MS response on this issue is at
 
>> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/22/protecting-the-pre-os-environment-with-uefi.aspx 
>> .
>>
>> Matthew then responded to this at http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/6503.html 
>> .
>
> For those that don't want to read through a lot of technical stuff he  
> said:
>
> 	"But for the foreseeable future, you'll be able to buy hardware that  
> runs Linux."

Some more context, for those of you who don't want to bother reading the
whole article:

This quote is from a footnote. The oroginal text:


The obvious workaround is for them to just turn off secure boot.
Ignoring the arguments over whether or not OEMs will provide that
option[[[[[6]]]]], it benefits nobody for Linux installation to require
disabling a legitimate security feature. It's also not likely to be in a
standard location on all systems and may have different naming. It's a
support nightmare. Let's focus on trying to find a solution that
provides the security and doesn't have obvious scaling issues.

And the footnote itself:

[6] And to forestall panic, at this point we expect that most OEMs will
provide this option on most hardware, if only because customers will
still want to boot Windows 7. We do know that some hardware will ship
without it. It's not implausible that some OEMs will remove it in order
to reduce their support burden. But for the foreseeable future, you'll
be able to buy hardware that runs Linux.


So yeah. Matthew Garret says we have nothing to worry about in the
forseeable future. I guess I should learn to read british
understatements.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il |                    | a Mutt's
tzafrir at cohens.org.il |                    |  best
tzafrir at debian.org    |                    | friend