On 02/28/2013 12:53 AM, Dale Dellutri wrote:
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 6:27 AM, zxq9<z...@zxq9.com> wrote:
There is a silver lining. The board makers themselves are out to sell boards
and laptops and tablets and can be reasoned with. My company is an extremely
small player in the hardware field but we've had positive response from
vendors when inquiring about having our own keys included on boards
alongside Microsoft's when doing bulk orders. We haven't had to go that
route yet so I'm unsure how much of a pain that would actually be to manage
(doesn't appear much more difficult than managing repository keys though,
for example), but this leaves the door open for even tiny computing
companies and larger IT departments to arrange for their own "secure" boot
keys to be pre-installed by the board manufacturers and not violate
Microsoft's requirements, even on ARM. That said, since we don't do showroom
marketing anyway neither we nor our suppliers have a need to put little
"Windows8 Ready" stickers on anything they ship to us anyway.
... (SNIPPED) ...
Doesn't this lower the eventual resale value of the laptop? Doesn't it restrict
the laptop to run only what either MS wants or what you installed?
I buy refurbished laptops and install Fedora, but I might want to try *BSD or
Ubuntu or something else in the future. Doesn't the "silver lining" restrict
that with these UEFI laptops?
It does indeed lower the overall value to the buyer -- which is why
we're not satisfied with the concept of "secure boot", even if a board
maker puts our keys on the device: we want to sell hardware, and
providing a device the user can do whatever he wants to independent of
us is a more competitive selling position than selling, essentially, a
"locked" device.
This is not a good move for the industry for this exact reason. Of
course, laptop makers think this means they will be able to sell one
device per instance/OS a user wants -- but especially in the consumer
space this is wishful thinking.
If standard UEFI situation ever moves from "user disable-able" to
"always on by default" then every device sold will essentially be a
locked device that requires jailbreaking to work properly. Offering
unlocked devices is far more competitive -- but the dialogue of the
industry has made a mystical security claim that lay users don't
understand and magically transformed vendor-jailing of devices from a
usability impediment into a must-have feature.
