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| Authored by: pem on Friday, July 06 2012 @ 11:00 AM EDT |
> If a user can't plug in a flash drive, hit F8 during boot
Some of them can't and never will. Or, even if they could, where would they get
the stuff on the flash drive to use?
> I posit they're too hopeless to ever use any piece of software.
Nice. But despite your assertions, they actually do. (Use software.)
> As for the bootstrap problem, how did they get the copy of the OS they're
about to install?
The whole point of Canonical's exercise, if you would bother to read their
stuff, is that, unlike Red Hat, THEY ARE PREINSTALLED ON LOTS OF 'PUTERS.
In other words, they are catering to the people who AREN'T installing OSes.
However, due to the GPL, they also have to cater to people who want to install
OSes, and if they use GPL v3, they also have to cater to people who want to
reinstall OSes on the same PC. Which the OEM might have made impossible.
Whether because of a screwup, or because of following Microsoft's dictates.
So Canonical's solution is that the bootloader doesn't require the kernel to be
signed -- you could use any Linux, or BSD, or any other OS with their
bootloader, but that, just in case the system vendor screws up and doesn't allow
other keys to be loaded, you might not be able to replace or maintain the
bootloader yourself. As others have pointed out, if you can't do this, it's
because of decisions the machine vendor made. And as Canonical and the FSF both
pointed out, those sorts of decisions make the bootloader itself incompatible
with GPL v3. All the other discussion about other .deb files and signing are a
red herring -- Ubuntu, like other distributions, lets users update packages from
whatever repository they want, or from their own recompile.
The FSF will tell you that no vendor should be allowed to ship such a locked
down system, but a Canonical bootloader that lets you get to the linux of your
choice makes it much less locked down in practice.
Also, note that Canonical's solution doesn't REQUIRE a vendor to disallow the
ability to load other keys or disable secure boot; it just makes it possible to
load Linux (or BSD or whatever) in some cases even if the vendor's box doesn't
have the key replacement or secure boot disable capability for whatever reason.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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