> > You've made an important mistake. You said "their system". Now its "our > > code" and "whoever bought the units' hardware" so it isn't their anything. > > Yes, the hardware belongs to the user, and the software belongs to the Linux > community. However I think I wasn't 100% clear, I also mean keeping > companies > networks and content secured. Credit card companies insuring the software > hasn't been modified to skim cards (not that it's the only way to skim a > card),
If credit card companies are doing this they are failing badly and it clearly isn't working. Also lets be clear about this - I don't need any credit card company network access to skim older cards, and the newer ones have been broken by various non software schemes. > or Tivo making sure that their content providers are protected. Lets look > at > the credit card example. Sure the user could modify the system and boot > their > own kernel, but it doesn't have to play nice with Mastercard's network > anymore. > Or better yet, would actually report that a certain business's card reader > had > been tampered with. That to me is a fair comment. I should IMHO be able to load my code and my keys on my Tivo. And Walt Disney in return probably should be quite free not to trust my keys. You need some fairly strong competition law enforcement to make all that work right in the marketplace but as a philosophical basis it seems fine. In practice it is likely to lead to serious monopoly abuse problems and all sorts of ugly tying of goods that you don't want in a free market. Given the completely ineffectual way the US enforces its anti-monopoly law, and the slowness of the EU at it the results might well be bad - but for other reasons. Alan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/