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| Authored by: PolR on Wednesday, June 06 2012 @ 02:49 PM EDT |
Fedora solution is a ugly hack but what else could they do?
Making your own hardware isn't an option when you have an existing Windows
machine and want to move to Linux. You may be a Windows user wanting to try
something else. Or you may want to extend the life of old hardware. Making your
own hardware presupposes that you know you want Linux from the beginning and are
willing to tamper with the hardware yourself. This is a formidable barrier of
entry. New machines of today will be the old machines five years from now.
Microsoft is locking up the future.
We have a situation where the copyrights of Microsoft are extended to a right to
vet which OS will boot on the machine you own. I would call that copyright
abuse. It calls for regulatory action.
I sense that Microsoft might be using a "boil the frog" strategy. They
put restrictions on ARM computers, shutting down this growth path for Linux.
They implement their power to control on Intel. They let Linux run on Intel for
now and they will claim no harm is done. But their power gets entrenched. There
is no telling how they will use it.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 06 2012 @ 02:53 PM EDT |
> All Microsoft has to do is tell the likes of Gigabyte, Asus etc ...
I am sure that MS would like to be able to do that, but fortunately it has no
power to do that.
MS has control over the OEMs because they make most of their revenue selling
Windows machines and they have to buy licences for each one. MS gives discounts
and other incentives based on 'loyalty'. If the OEM does not comply by shipping
Windows on machines then the OEM could lose the discount across the whole
range.
With Netbooks, for example, they came out when Vista was the current product. By
making a small, cheap device that could not run Vista they could ship these with
Linux without affecting the discounts of all other products. But MS brought XP
back from the dead just for this so that the OEMs then had to use it or pay MS
millions more.
In many ways it seems that HP's WebOS suffered the same problem. With WOA/WinRT
MS could claim disloyalty if HP sold another OS where Windows could run (even if
it wasn't really Windows). It may be that HP evaluated the costs and decided
that dumping WebOS was less costly than losing the MS 'discounts' on _all_
products.
However, MS does not have such a hold on the manufacturers. OEMs may well order
boards that they need to meet Windows requirements, and some OEMs may make their
own. But if Gigabyte wants to also sell motherboards that _won't_ run Windows
they can do so because they don't buy from MS and so have no 'discounts' to
lose.
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| Authored by: Cassandra on Thursday, June 07 2012 @ 07:20 AM EDT |
| MS demands that Secure Boot be enabled for Windows-On-ARM (WOA) hardware.
Which basically means that MS is determined that Linux will never gain a
toe-hold with MS tablets. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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