Posted on 09/27/2011 8:25:02 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Smells to high heaven, IMO.
If I build my own, will I be forced to buy a motherboard that is crippled?
NO.
That statement was from the perspective of doing a comparative assesment of the affects of a business model that leaves hardware development to the hardware manufacturers and trying to write the OS to support as much of that as possible, vs a business model of writing an OS designed for a limited hardware platform controlled and manufactured by the company writing the OS.
when in doubt, accuse MS ..
MS was never a hardware developer, so why would they? In the case of Apple, until recently they always had ties to hardware and software.
MS is increasingly trying to force the hardware manufacturers and PC assemblers to enforce their licensing. To the point of trying to hold the U.S. manufacturers responsible for their ChiCom hardware suppliers. They recently had defectors on that attempt.
Since we are on the subject. There is a reason that hardware, operating systems and applications were developed separately. The complexity and the skills were dispersed. Openness allowed all this to happen.
Oh, and I forgot. There were also the BIOS guys.
If you were in charge of license enforcement, how would you do it?
will be unable to perform secure boot of any operating system other than Microsoft’s
IIRC, it was compaq that originally reverse engineered BIOS in a clean-room environment. Without access to BIOS routines, we would have been fooked.
As I understand the situation, it will be able to perform a *secure* boot of any signed OS that has the matching keys installed in the firmware.
If the motherboard manufacturer doesn't give you the option to enable a non-secure boot, then you won't be able to boot an unsigned OS, or signed OS that the firmware doesn't have the keys to validate.
I've also seen some discussion about the motherboard manufacturers providing the ability to update the installed keys in the firmware. With this option, you should be able to obtain a generic copy of a Linux (or any other OS) distro, sign it, and install the keys for cert into the firmware and then do a *secure* boot of that OS.
At this point claiming that this will prevent you from ever booting anything but Windows on a Windows PC appears to be FUD. It's possible that a manufacturer could design and ship a motherboard that only has the Windows keys installed, doesn't allow you to select the option of doing a non-secure boot, and doesn't have any provisions for updating the key collection. I'll leave it to you to speculate on the probability that a manufacturer would intentionally paint themselves into that corner.
Ms OS sequence:
Poor: 3.x, 95, 98, ME, Vista
Solid: NT, 2000, XP, W7/64
IMHO, W8 has all chances to follow along ME and Vista.
Thanks for the interesting and thoughtful response. Sounds like you understand the problem domain as well as most in the industry, maybe better. Sounds like the industry hasn’t quite figured out where everything is going to land on this one. Will definitely keep an eye out. Thanks again.
Apple computers may have still made computers a commodity, but this sort of strong arm tactic is one that Apple would’ve employed long, long ago. IMHO.
Although Apple in the interregnum between Jobs eras did license its OS for non-Apple hardware, under Jobs Apple has not so much sold licenses to OS X but has bundled OS X with its hardware - and refused to license OS X use on any other hardware.Apple would prefer a hardware feature which enabled OS X and which was unique to Apple to a technology which prevented other OSes from running on Apple hardware.
To the extent that Microsoft could undermine the production of hardware by independent OEM's which ran on any other OS than Windows, it would throw Apple - producer of its own hardware - directly into the briar patch. In that world, Hackintoshes wouldn't exist - and Apple's business model depends on the active desire of customers for OS X.Of course in the smartphone realm, Apple does oppose the "unlocking" of hardware.
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