Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 6:45 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Playing the game automatically concedes defeat by cas
Parent article: Signing ELF binaries

Actually knowing something about what you are talking about isn't a logical fallacy "appeal to authority", it's actually knowing something about what you are talking about.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 8:29 UTC (Sat) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link] (3 responses)

Entirely true. Also irrelevant. mj59 doesn't have any more valid an opinion about legal matters than I do.

I expect that any lawyers he has spoken to about secureboot would have been Redhat's lawyers, and their angle on the problem would have been entirely on the topic of Redhat's corporate needs, and how to solve the problem for RH in the most efficiently pragmatic way possible.

Pragmatism doesn't always conflict with idealism but this is one case where it definitely does.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 11:48 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Also, short-term pragmatism can conflict with long-term pragmatism. Idealism may sometimes be long-term pragmatism.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 27, 2013 16:18 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Red Hat has not always acted only for its own purposes. Take the patent settling cases where Red Hat got all of FOSS a license for the patents in question. So they do have a record for going beyond the (typical) call of duty.

That said, it would be nice to have some clarification of what they think the fallout of Microsoft revoking a Linux key (both for "but h4x" and "because market share[holders]" scenarios) would likely be.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 27, 2013 16:38 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

I can't speak for Red Hat, but the expected outcome of a revoked signature due to security issues is a staged update of new binaries followed by a blacklist update, with the only user-visible inconvenience being that old media will stop working. The expected outcome of a revoked signature due to any other issue is a series of lawsuits.