6 ms·

>It’s time for Richard Stallman to go I was expecting to see this, there is nothing more corporations would like more then to see him gone. Then they can take

by jmclnx 4y ago

>It’s time for Richard Stallman to go I was expecting to see this, there is nothing more corporations would like more then to see him gone. Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it. So far many of his predictions have come true and there are a few more that seems to be on their way to happening. What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD. This link is one prediction that seems to be where we are well on our way to heading for: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html If he is removed from the FSF, that will come true. edit: spelling

cassianoleal 4y ago
If you're right (and I'm not saying you're not), the FSF is already gone. RMS is 70 years old and will not be around forever.
brodouevencode 4y ago
> Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it. This is neither good nor bad, so I'm not sure why your whole point seemingly is based on it. Corporations will act in their own self-interests just like everyone else. There are examples of where corporations worked together and it turned out well for all and examples of the opposite happening, so I'm not sure why this is necessarily framed in such a negative way. EDIT: consider the Linux Foundation. They combine private and corporate interests fairly well, with no corporate capture, and they are succeeding in ways the FSF never has.
- richbell 4y ago
  > Corporations will act in their own self-interests just like everyone else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
  - brodouevencode 4y ago
    If the foundation is set up to allow this, then that's a fault of the structure of the foundation.
    - richbell 4y ago
      > If the foundation is set up to allow this, then that's a fault of the structure of the foundation. "If I'm able to exploit you, it's your fault" is a strange take. Just because something isn't expressly forbidden doesn't make it ethical or moral.
      - brodouevencode 4y ago
        The same take applies to individuals too, which basically nullifies your argument.
        richbell 4y ago
        > The same take applies to individuals too, which basically nullifies your argument. This in no way nullifies my argument.
- throwbadubadu 4y ago
  If you don't see why it doesn't fit here not sure what could be done to help it :( Its full bad.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > Corporations will act in their own self-interests just like everyone else. Corporations are not part of "everybody", except in insane US law which recognizes corporate "personhood". In other words: A corporation is not just like, or even remotely like, anybody.
  - brodouevencode 4y ago
    You made that association, not me. Corporations will act in the interests of the corporation - there is no argument here. A well-run foundation that would benefit from corporate help doesn't necessarily have to bend to the whims of the corporation. The Linux Foundation is a good example of where private/corporate partnerships are done much better.
FooBarWidget 4y ago
I don't disagree with allowing installing arbitrary OSes, but it seems to me like this fight is already lost because phones (much more important than laptops nowadays) don't even have root.
- veeti 4y ago
  Even more the reason to try and make sure it never happens to real computers.
zulban 4y ago
Maybe you'd appreciate my perspective on why they need to let Stallman go: https://blog.stuartspence.ca/oh-stallman.html https://blog.stuartspence.ca/oh-stallman.html From first hand experience, I believe he is clearly a net negative.
- subsistence234 4y ago
  most criticism I've read seems to boil down to: he's not a macchiavellian eel.
vasac 4y ago
Yeah, it's funny how they always want to reshape the FSF instead of creating a new organization with their own leadership, mission, and whatever else they want.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  people still confusing basic concepts as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524866
api 4y ago
They already have full control of the OSI and have made sure that the most popular open source licenses are friendly to the use of open source as free labor for huge SaaS companies.
rijoja 4y ago
[flagged]
micromacrofoot 4y ago
I really don't understand how people think one weird creep is somehow holding back corporate america from doing anything. The controversy isn't imagined, he's said some really off-putting stuff. At this point he's become so polarizing it doesn't matter anyway, it's just some weird tech drama no one wants anything to do with. The genie is out of the bottle and if we want this to be about software we need to move on.
- COGlory 4y ago
  Since when has the FSF been about software? It's about freedom.
roenxi 4y ago
I find it fascinating how unsubstantiated the calls can be. There isn't a proposed alternative. People are sure the FSF is dying but do not seem to have the charisma or social gravity to fork it. The person promoting Free Software is never going to be a billionaire - that limits the quality of candidates. Simple fact. Anyone of outstanding character devoting their life to selfless good isn't going to spend it promoting Free Software to a thankless and ignorant audience of ordinary computer users. Stallman is a lot better than nothing - honestly he's pretty good, we're probably going to see him replaced by someone less capable - and as you point out the alternatives are probably going to be compromises who dilute the freedom to serve corporate interests.
JeremyBanks 4y ago
[dead]
dale_glass 4y ago
> I was expecting to see this, there is nothing more corporations would like more then to see him gone. Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it. That's amazingly over-optimistic IMO. Stallman hasn't been relevant in decades. Companies don't fear him. The FSF is as far as I can tell politically irrelevant. Just look at even the nerdiest sites: HN, Slashdot, the Linux-centric subreddits. Nobody talks about what Stallman is doing today unless it's the old "Do we need a new FSF leader?" topic. Even that pops up infrequently to be then forgotten. Most of the time you see him brought up is in a historic sense, like your reference to the Right To Read, which is from 1997. I frequent all the places I listed, and from my activity there I haven't the faintest idea what Stallman or the FSF are up to. If that's the state in the places that would be most interested in what Stallman/the FSF have to say, then in further away areas things are just dire and their influence is probably close to nonexistent. I think Stallman did excellent and valuable work. But he just doesn't make an effective leader at this point. I think he'd make a far better "guru". The FSF should shove him to the side to some sort of consulting role, and give the role of the public face to somebody who can communicate more effectively. And in any case, that's going to be needed on a pretty short timeframe anyway, since the man is just old. He can't do this forever, so there has to exist a worthy successor.
- pama 4y ago
  Not sure what you mean here. The formal role of RMS in FSF today is not that of a leader (nor president, nor treasury.)
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    He's a board member with voting rights. The board sets the direction for the FSF, so that's a leadership position.
dralley 4y ago
What significant, tangible accomplishments does Stallmann have in the past 15 years? Because even before the controversy, it seems like he: * Presided over and actively contributed to the decline of GCC and gave up the world of compiler-based-tools and compiler research to LLVM by insisting on making it impossible to use GCC as a library. Pissed off the emacs maintainers in the process. * Pissed off the glibc maintainers by trying to veto the removal of an abortion joke from the manual, even though he's had no involvement in glibc for years and "veto" is not a reasonable power for him to have nor one that he has ever had. On this basis a lot of other maintainers got pissed off about the level of control he was demanding over details that have nothing to do with software freedom * Has done absolutely nothing to address any threat to free software since 2005, or otherwise adapt to the changing needs of developers to keep FSF/GNU relevant. RMS has no idea what those needs even are because the man reads his email with curl. And now he's been back for a while, and nothing continues to happen, and the FSF is increasingly irrelevant year over year without even taking optics into consideration.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- amno 4y ago
  > What significant, tangible accomplishments does Stallmann have in the past 15 years? You believe you will never grow old? Do you wish your family and friends to turn back on you because you are old and don't have the same energy as you had when you were 20? The question is how the landscape would look like today and if there even would be "open source" in the broader sense as we see it today, with permissive licenses, if it wasn't for him. Sure, you can look at a person's mistakes only, but you could also look at all the good a person has done. Do you yourself ever do mistakes? You never made a bad decision in your entire life? C'mon. To err is human. How would world look like if everyone was thrown out from the job and the society when they do a mistake, and if everything in the world would be judged by mistakes and not by the value it adds. Reflect over yourself first, are you sure you are qualified to throw a rock?
  - dralley 4y ago
no_time 4y ago
>What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD. Can you provide an example or article? I have not yet encountered an intel platform that refuses to erase the secure boot keys. That being said, I would not be surprised.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  Let me google that for you https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=377054 https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=377054 There was an article on a new lenovo model that you cannot install linux on, but to lazy to look for it. Quote from a lonk: >Lenovo says Microsoft requires they block Linux from booting on such PCs. ... ... >This has nothing to do with better security. It is simply about restricting consumer choice by making it more difficult to install something other than Microsoft Windows
  - rascul 4y ago
    The claim was: > Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD. The Linux Mint forum post includes this: > To be able to boot Linux on such PCs you need to either disable secure boot in the BIOS or you need to enable the "Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA" option in the Security section of the BIOS. Then if you follow the link to the document from Lenovo: > Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default. This means that for any of these Lenovo platforms shipped with Windows preinstalled an extra step is needed to allow Linux to boot with secure boot enabled. Following that, Lenovo even gives instructions how to do it. So it seems clear to me that it's allowed and that this does not match the original claim.
  - worg 4y ago
    From the same forum post: > To be able to boot Linux on such PCs you need to either disable secure boot in the BIOS or you need to enable the "Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA" option in the Security section of the BIOS. it's not like they're blocking completely the ability to install Linux, anyone installing Linux should be able to follow those steps. Don't get me wrong I'm no Lenovo/MS fan but spreading FUD is not the way edit: formatting
jsnell 4y ago
> What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. How would they do that? They have no influence, and if anything have worked for decades to alienate any potential allies. Nor do they have any leverage via the software or licenses the control. The only GPL software that's best of breed is Linux, which FSF has no say on. No critical software uses the latest versions of GPL.
- subsistence234 4y ago
  [flagged]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 4y ago
You're referring to this all in the wrong tense. Corporations don't need to replace Richard Stallman because they already got Eric Raymond to replace his entire movement with the "apolitical" version: the Open Source Initiative. This happened decades ago. RMS warned us about it, we didn't care. The dystopia in Right to Read also happened decades ago: it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System. Less toy-like examples would be embedded systems and cellphones, which have always been locked-down[0] since day one (waaaaay before the iPhone popularized this business model). The FSF isn't positioned to stop this. Microsoft pushed for locked-down PCs back in 2012, with Windows RT[1]. It failed not because Defective by Design made a good protest campaign and got Congress to stop it, but because Microsoft made several key strategic blunders that made their attack on freedom irrelevant. If Intel fails in pushing Linux or BSD off of people's laptops, it will not be because the FSF stopped it, either. The problem with RMS is that his area of expertise is several decades old and his activism has taken time away from him maintaining that expertise. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the FSF was purely an activism project; but it also maintains an operating system and several other core utilities. The people actually fighting on the front lines of software freedom these days (e.g. Hector Martin) consider the FSF to be functionally impotent. The diversity concerns raised in the posted article are downstream of this: the FSF is still used to telling a very specific brand of techie why they should care about software freedom, they don't know how to make a convincing argument to the general public. Now, let's contrast that to right-to-repair. This is a concern downstream of software freedom: you can't meaningfully restrict repair practices if you can modify the software on the device. So it might seem like a side-show we should just ignore. However, it's seen a lot more attention than software freedom. We've gotten right-to-repair legislation in Massachusetts and Colorado. And this is a function of two things: - This being a more concrete and understandable concern. Nobody cares about being able to modify the software on their Tesla - until they need to break the software locks on their Tesla that keep them from swapping parts. - Activism from people (e.g. Louis Rossman) who are willing to touch scummy social media platforms. The last one is important. Social media is how a lot of political activism happens, for better and for worse. But as far as I'm aware the FSF does not have a presence here. Nobody at the FSF is making, say, punchy YouTube video essays or Twitbooktodon posts explaining the through-line between not having source code and corporations doing bad things to you. And as far as I'm aware their lobbying arm is nonexistent. [0] Or, at least, not intended to be user programmable in ways that make locking them down palatable to consumers. [1] The ARM port of Windows 8
philistine 4y ago
I'm endlessly fascinated by people who have one major problem (inability to run unsigned code) and assign blame to another thing (secure boot). We're talking about technology here! The problem is one of implementation. And Apple, of all companies, has offered an implementation solution. Their ARM chips in Macs can boot an OS with a fully-vetted chain of trust on the same drive as a completely untrusted Linux distro. And macOS does not reduce its security level to allow this. Why can't Intel do that? Wouldn't that be a great compromise? Don't any Linux people see value in a chain of trust?
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  Signed code is great iff the user can sign code and choose whose signatures are valid.
- Longlius 4y ago
  There's nothing wrong with chain of trust. There's everything wrong with the end user not being allowed to choose which chain of trust to allow.
bradgranath 4y ago
They should just 'stop' the move the secure boot, eh? By doing what, exactly?

by jmclnx 4y ago

cassianoleal 4y ago

If you're right (and I'm not saying you're not), the FSF is already gone. RMS is 70 years old and will not be around forever.

brodouevencode 4y ago

> Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it. This is neither good nor bad, so I'm not sure why your whole point seemingly is based on it. Corporations will act in their own self-interests just like everyone else. There are examples of where corporations worked together and it turned out well for all and examples of the opposite happening, so I'm not sure why this is necessarily framed in such a negative way. EDIT: consider the Linux Foundation. They combine private and corporate interests fairly well, with no corporate capture, and they are succeeding in ways the FSF never has.

richbell 4y ago
> Corporations will act in their own self-interests just like everyone else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  If the foundation is set up to allow this, then that's a fault of the structure of the foundation.
  - richbell 4y ago
    > If the foundation is set up to allow this, then that's a fault of the structure of the foundation. "If I'm able to exploit you, it's your fault" is a strange take. Just because something isn't expressly forbidden doesn't make it ethical or moral.
    - brodouevencode 4y ago
      The same take applies to individuals too, which basically nullifies your argument.
      - richbell 4y ago
        > The same take applies to individuals too, which basically nullifies your argument. This in no way nullifies my argument.
throwbadubadu 4y ago
If you don't see why it doesn't fit here not sure what could be done to help it :( Its full bad.
einpoklum 4y ago
> Corporations will act in their own self-interests just like everyone else. Corporations are not part of "everybody", except in insane US law which recognizes corporate "personhood". In other words: A corporation is not just like, or even remotely like, anybody.
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  You made that association, not me. Corporations will act in the interests of the corporation - there is no argument here. A well-run foundation that would benefit from corporate help doesn't necessarily have to bend to the whims of the corporation. The Linux Foundation is a good example of where private/corporate partnerships are done much better.

FooBarWidget 4y ago

I don't disagree with allowing installing arbitrary OSes, but it seems to me like this fight is already lost because phones (much more important than laptops nowadays) don't even have root.

veeti 4y ago
Even more the reason to try and make sure it never happens to real computers.

zulban 4y ago

Maybe you'd appreciate my perspective on why they need to let Stallman go: https://blog.stuartspence.ca/oh-stallman.html https://blog.stuartspence.ca/oh-stallman.html From first hand experience, I believe he is clearly a net negative.

subsistence234 4y ago
most criticism I've read seems to boil down to: he's not a macchiavellian eel.

vasac 4y ago

Yeah, it's funny how they always want to reshape the FSF instead of creating a new organization with their own leadership, mission, and whatever else they want.

pelasaco 4y ago
people still confusing basic concepts as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524866

api 4y ago

They already have full control of the OSI and have made sure that the most popular open source licenses are friendly to the use of open source as free labor for huge SaaS companies.

rijoja 4y ago

[flagged]

micromacrofoot 4y ago

I really don't understand how people think one weird creep is somehow holding back corporate america from doing anything. The controversy isn't imagined, he's said some really off-putting stuff. At this point he's become so polarizing it doesn't matter anyway, it's just some weird tech drama no one wants anything to do with. The genie is out of the bottle and if we want this to be about software we need to move on.

COGlory 4y ago
Since when has the FSF been about software? It's about freedom.

roenxi 4y ago

I find it fascinating how unsubstantiated the calls can be. There isn't a proposed alternative. People are sure the FSF is dying but do not seem to have the charisma or social gravity to fork it. The person promoting Free Software is never going to be a billionaire - that limits the quality of candidates. Simple fact. Anyone of outstanding character devoting their life to selfless good isn't going to spend it promoting Free Software to a thankless and ignorant audience of ordinary computer users. Stallman is a lot better than nothing - honestly he's pretty good, we're probably going to see him replaced by someone less capable - and as you point out the alternatives are probably going to be compromises who dilute the freedom to serve corporate interests.

JeremyBanks 4y ago

[dead]

dale_glass 4y ago

> I was expecting to see this, there is nothing more corporations would like more then to see him gone. Then they can take full control of the FSF, already they have their hands in it. That's amazingly over-optimistic IMO. Stallman hasn't been relevant in decades. Companies don't fear him. The FSF is as far as I can tell politically irrelevant. Just look at even the nerdiest sites: HN, Slashdot, the Linux-centric subreddits. Nobody talks about what Stallman is doing today unless it's the old "Do we need a new FSF leader?" topic. Even that pops up infrequently to be then forgotten. Most of the time you see him brought up is in a historic sense, like your reference to the Right To Read, which is from 1997. I frequent all the places I listed, and from my activity there I haven't the faintest idea what Stallman or the FSF are up to. If that's the state in the places that would be most interested in what Stallman/the FSF have to say, then in further away areas things are just dire and their influence is probably close to nonexistent. I think Stallman did excellent and valuable work. But he just doesn't make an effective leader at this point. I think he'd make a far better "guru". The FSF should shove him to the side to some sort of consulting role, and give the role of the public face to somebody who can communicate more effectively. And in any case, that's going to be needed on a pretty short timeframe anyway, since the man is just old. He can't do this forever, so there has to exist a worthy successor.

pama 4y ago
Not sure what you mean here. The formal role of RMS in FSF today is not that of a leader (nor president, nor treasury.)
- dale_glass 4y ago
  He's a board member with voting rights. The board sets the direction for the FSF, so that's a leadership position.

dralley 4y ago

What significant, tangible accomplishments does Stallmann have in the past 15 years? Because even before the controversy, it seems like he: * Presided over and actively contributed to the decline of GCC and gave up the world of compiler-based-tools and compiler research to LLVM by insisting on making it impossible to use GCC as a library. Pissed off the emacs maintainers in the process. * Pissed off the glibc maintainers by trying to veto the removal of an abortion joke from the manual, even though he's had no involvement in glibc for years and "veto" is not a reasonable power for him to have nor one that he has ever had. On this basis a lot of other maintainers got pissed off about the level of control he was demanding over details that have nothing to do with software freedom * Has done absolutely nothing to address any threat to free software since 2005, or otherwise adapt to the changing needs of developers to keep FSF/GNU relevant. RMS has no idea what those needs even are because the man reads his email with curl. And now he's been back for a while, and nothing continues to happen, and the FSF is increasingly irrelevant year over year without even taking optics into consideration.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
amno 4y ago
> What significant, tangible accomplishments does Stallmann have in the past 15 years? You believe you will never grow old? Do you wish your family and friends to turn back on you because you are old and don't have the same energy as you had when you were 20? The question is how the landscape would look like today and if there even would be "open source" in the broader sense as we see it today, with permissive licenses, if it wasn't for him. Sure, you can look at a person's mistakes only, but you could also look at all the good a person has done. Do you yourself ever do mistakes? You never made a bad decision in your entire life? C'mon. To err is human. How would world look like if everyone was thrown out from the job and the society when they do a mistake, and if everything in the world would be judged by mistakes and not by the value it adds. Reflect over yourself first, are you sure you are qualified to throw a rock?
- dralley 4y ago

no_time 4y ago

>What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD. Can you provide an example or article? I have not yet encountered an intel platform that refuses to erase the secure boot keys. That being said, I would not be surprised.

jmclnx 4y ago
Let me google that for you https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=377054 https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=377054 There was an article on a new lenovo model that you cannot install linux on, but to lazy to look for it. Quote from a lonk: >Lenovo says Microsoft requires they block Linux from booting on such PCs. ... ... >This has nothing to do with better security. It is simply about restricting consumer choice by making it more difficult to install something other than Microsoft Windows
- rascul 4y ago
  The claim was: > Already there are Intel Laptops being created that will not allow us to replace Windows with Linux or a BSD. The Linux Mint forum post includes this: > To be able to boot Linux on such PCs you need to either disable secure boot in the BIOS or you need to enable the "Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA" option in the Security section of the BIOS. Then if you follow the link to the document from Lenovo: > Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default. This means that for any of these Lenovo platforms shipped with Windows preinstalled an extra step is needed to allow Linux to boot with secure boot enabled. Following that, Lenovo even gives instructions how to do it. So it seems clear to me that it's allowed and that this does not match the original claim.
- worg 4y ago
  From the same forum post: > To be able to boot Linux on such PCs you need to either disable secure boot in the BIOS or you need to enable the "Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA" option in the Security section of the BIOS. it's not like they're blocking completely the ability to install Linux, anyone installing Linux should be able to follow those steps. Don't get me wrong I'm no Lenovo/MS fan but spreading FUD is not the way edit: formatting

jsnell 4y ago

> What FSF should do is work stop the move to secure boot. How would they do that? They have no influence, and if anything have worked for decades to alienate any potential allies. Nor do they have any leverage via the software or licenses the control. The only GPL software that's best of breed is Linux, which FSF has no say on. No critical software uses the latest versions of GPL.

subsistence234 4y ago
[flagged]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kmeisthax 4y ago

You're referring to this all in the wrong tense. Corporations don't need to replace Richard Stallman because they already got Eric Raymond to replace his entire movement with the "apolitical" version: the Open Source Initiative. This happened decades ago. RMS warned us about it, we didn't care. The dystopia in Right to Read also happened decades ago: it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System. Less toy-like examples would be embedded systems and cellphones, which have always been locked-down[0] since day one (waaaaay before the iPhone popularized this business model). The FSF isn't positioned to stop this. Microsoft pushed for locked-down PCs back in 2012, with Windows RT[1]. It failed not because Defective by Design made a good protest campaign and got Congress to stop it, but because Microsoft made several key strategic blunders that made their attack on freedom irrelevant. If Intel fails in pushing Linux or BSD off of people's laptops, it will not be because the FSF stopped it, either. The problem with RMS is that his area of expertise is several decades old and his activism has taken time away from him maintaining that expertise. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the FSF was purely an activism project; but it also maintains an operating system and several other core utilities. The people actually fighting on the front lines of software freedom these days (e.g. Hector Martin) consider the FSF to be functionally impotent. The diversity concerns raised in the posted article are downstream of this: the FSF is still used to telling a very specific brand of techie why they should care about software freedom, they don't know how to make a convincing argument to the general public. Now, let's contrast that to right-to-repair. This is a concern downstream of software freedom: you can't meaningfully restrict repair practices if you can modify the software on the device. So it might seem like a side-show we should just ignore. However, it's seen a lot more attention than software freedom. We've gotten right-to-repair legislation in Massachusetts and Colorado. And this is a function of two things: - This being a more concrete and understandable concern. Nobody cares about being able to modify the software on their Tesla - until they need to break the software locks on their Tesla that keep them from swapping parts. - Activism from people (e.g. Louis Rossman) who are willing to touch scummy social media platforms. The last one is important. Social media is how a lot of political activism happens, for better and for worse. But as far as I'm aware the FSF does not have a presence here. Nobody at the FSF is making, say, punchy YouTube video essays or Twitbooktodon posts explaining the through-line between not having source code and corporations doing bad things to you. And as far as I'm aware their lobbying arm is nonexistent. [0] Or, at least, not intended to be user programmable in ways that make locking them down palatable to consumers. [1] The ARM port of Windows 8

philistine 4y ago

I'm endlessly fascinated by people who have one major problem (inability to run unsigned code) and assign blame to another thing (secure boot). We're talking about technology here! The problem is one of implementation. And Apple, of all companies, has offered an implementation solution. Their ARM chips in Macs can boot an OS with a fully-vetted chain of trust on the same drive as a completely untrusted Linux distro. And macOS does not reduce its security level to allow this. Why can't Intel do that? Wouldn't that be a great compromise? Don't any Linux people see value in a chain of trust?

erik_seaberg 4y ago
Signed code is great iff the user can sign code and choose whose signatures are valid.
Longlius 4y ago
There's nothing wrong with chain of trust. There's everything wrong with the end user not being allowed to choose which chain of trust to allow.

bradgranath 4y ago

They should just 'stop' the move the secure boot, eh? By doing what, exactly?