Defeat
No matter how much lipstick you put on it, this is a defeat for the open source world and for computing in general. Red Hat's efforts to mitigate the problem are laudable, but the truth is that starting from today, your computer is designed not to trust you, doesn't actually belong to you, and you are only "conceded" the grant to write software that doesn't interfere with the interests of the "external owners" of the hardware you paid for. And this is true only as long as "secure boot" isn't made a fixed feature (which is clearly the next step - they've already done it on ARM!). After that we'll only be consumers. First they came for the smartphones, then they came for the tablets...
Saying that this is done for the user's security is like believing that curfews and censorship are in the interest of the security of well-behaving citizens (ask Franklin about that). So flags down, this is a sad day for the PC architecture. Microsoft won in the end.
No matter how much lipstick you put on it, this is a defeat for the open source world and for computing in general. Red Hat's efforts to mitigate the problem are laudable, but the truth is that starting from today, your computer is designed not to trust you, doesn't actually belong to you, and you are only "conceded" the grant to write software that doesn't interfere with the interests of the "external owners" of the hardware you paid for. And this is true only as long as "secure boot" isn't made a fixed feature (which is clearly the next step - they've already done it on ARM!). After that we'll only be consumers. First they came for the smartphones, then they came for the tablets...
Saying that this is done for the user's security is like believing that curfews and censorship are in the interest of the security of well-behaving citizens (ask Franklin about that). So flags down, this is a sad day for the PC architecture. Microsoft won in the end.
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