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Garrett: UEFI secure bootingGarrett: UEFI secure bootingPosted Sep 20, 2011 23:27 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)Parent article: Garrett: UEFI secure booting
The second approach would make it impossible to run boxed copies of Windows on Windows logo hardware, and also impossible to install new versions of Windows unless your OEM provided a new signed copy. The former seems more likely.
I don't agree, this second option seems more likely for some and maybe even the majority of vendors.
Every time the new version of Windows doesn't work with their printer, scanner, etc. many people go to the store and buy a brand new one. Doing this repeatedly hasn't hurt these vendors, on the contrary.
Utterly disabling second hand resale value and crippling long term usefulness of your product is an _excellent_ strategy for consumer products. Ethically dubious, but not technically criminal and certainly profitable, what's not to like?
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Garrett: UEFI secure booting Posted Sep 22, 2011 11:37 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]
In the clueless drooling-consumer market, hardware locked to Windows may gain a place in the market, just as phones locked to a particular network don't deter many sales. (If the word gets out that unlocking is *impossible* it may deter a few more, but there again, they buy Apple stuff! )
In the business arena, I think it will get the hardware onto a blacklist in many environments. The entire science and engineering faculty of any university, for example, wouldn't touch anything that couldn't run Linux by design with a bargepole. Probably the same for any commercial engineering R&D, any film studio, any bioscience facility.
Where I work, Dell has lost our (science faculty) business because we couldn't rely on them to supply hardware exactly as specified (and tested to work with Linux). Their attitude was that the wrong hardware was part of their "ongoing improvement process". It might have been for Windows users, but if it stopped us booting out pre-built Linux images, it meant their hardware was slightly less useful than a heap of rubble. So we found another supplier, where if we ordered a system with a particular tested and acceptable motherboard and graphics card, that's what we got - no substitutes except with explicit permission.
Hypervisors? Posted Sep 22, 2011 11:46 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]
Another reason for businesses to object is that if a machine is locked Windows-only, it won't be able to boot a hypervisor any more than it will be able to boot Linux.
Of course, it's possible that VMware (say) will throw their commercial hat into the lock-down arena and decide to collect a VMware tax on systems shipped with their hypervisor locked in. However, even that wouldn't be nearly as bad as a Windows-only future.
In a future where Gbits of network bandwidth become effectively free, I'd expect hypervisors on the business desktop to become quite popular.
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