I disagree. It's entirely possible to have a good free (as in beer and freedom) full disk encryption tool. In fact, we have several which are in quite wide use

I disagree. It's entirely possible to have a good free (as in beer and freedom) full disk encryption tool. In fact, we have several which are in quite wide use today. See: dm-crypt, loop-aes, luks, tcplay, encfs, ecryptfs, etc (okay, some of these aren't FDE tools in and of themselves, but parts of a system which can be used for FDE). Anyone who uses FDE on Linux is surely using one or two of these. It's really just a matter of someone being motivated enough to develop one for Windows. The entire reason for TrueCrypt's popularity over Bitlocker was that it was open source software. All this means is that one developer got sick and tired of it, which is completely understandable, but it can absolutely not be extrapolated to say that all have. DiskCryptor is currently looking like the next big viable alternative for an open source Windows FDE tool. I'm hoping we see some EFI support though, so I can finally get off BIOS mode. In my opinion, the best method is to gather a few skilled Windows driver developers to craft a driver based around existing technology, like FreeOTFE, which supports dm-crypt images. It'll be interesting to see what happens, I certainly think the demand and interest is high enough that we can get some good people on the case. Hopefully some who won't select a ridiculous license.