4 ms·
> Linus is really smart, but sometimes he makes a snap decision and then will perform whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to defend it to the death. Hmm,
by mcgwiz 14y ago
> Linus is really smart, but sometimes he makes a snap decision and then will perform whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to defend it to the death.
Hmm, could it be argued that this is less a snap judgement and more one of strengthening the long-term political and technical health of the OS? Rather than take the easier short-term path, which may eventually put Linux's metaphorical balls into a Microsoft vice, he would rather expose some pain now to defend as much as possible long-term autonomy. I would imagine this to be true given Torvald's historic ability to keep Linux healthy and viable in spite of one of the world's most powerful corporations.
Thus, in the short term, the user must perform some gymnastics to boot new kernels, but if this inconvenience is really that painful, it will create market disequilibrium that will motivate creative solutions. Some naive, off-the-cuff ideas:
- vendors pre-installing trusted root certs for Linux distros or a consortium of them,
- vendors making it easy to disable SecureBoot (physical switch?),
- vendors forcing SecureBoot configuration/opt-in on very first boot,
- UI, tools, or documentation enhancements to make local key management and signing easier, or
- simply a slightly more aware userbase (the same way phone locking/unlocking became a mainstream concept).
- rodgerd 14y ago"Naive" is an overly polite way of describing ideas which lead in with an idea that flies in the face of pretty much the whole history of Linux.
- mcgwiz 14y ago:) DH2, or DH3, at best. http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html Market-driven vendor support of Linux is not unprecedented. Ever heard of Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Nvidia, or the Android ecosystem?
- trotsky 14y agoI don't think there is much evidence for this being part of a long term plan on his part to resist microsoft's influence. If that was the primary concern where was the criticism when his employer, The Linux Foundation, announced with great fanfare that they had released a microsoft ca signed boot loader to support linux uefi secure boot with the default oem trust setups. If there is anyone that has a chance at providing a FOSS UEFI signing alternative to Microsoft it's the Linux Foundation. But they're unwilling or unable to do it. Redhat is unwilling to and has proven they have trouble securing their signing keys. Canonical tried and failed to sell vendors on including a ubuntu key, and they weren't even looking to sign for other companies. There will soon be plenty of people running linux on their computers with secure boot enabled and relying on Microsoft's CA for a chain of trust. It's a done deal and no one is out there stepping up to provide a viable FOSS PKI alternative. The only thing being debated here is if many of them will be running rather slow and buggy video drivers.