02.12.13
Advertising and Legitimising Microsoft Control of Linux
Summary: Former Novell people and others who help normalise anticompetitive behaviour
Recently, boards were made which self-destruct because of Microsoft demands. A lot of journalists were missing the point, which is that UEFI restricted boot is controlled by and imposed by Microsoft, and is generally better off rejected as it doesn't really contribute to security.
Dr. Garrett passes blame to Samsung for a scheme that was Microsoft’s idea, as seen here. One must not forget that without Microsoft pressure, none of it would have happened.
The UEFI saga is being rewritten now as Garrett is generating press coverage to blame Samsung, not Microsoft. To quote a pro-Linux site, “Linux developer Matthew Garrett, who does a lot of research into UEFI topics, writes in a blog post that by storing a large amount of data in UEFI variables, he managed to disrupt a Samsung notebook running Windows to such a degree that it subsequently refused to start. In his post, the developer also points to some sample code of the Windows program that he executed at administrator level to disable the notebook. The developer had previously speculated that some Samsung notebooks with UEFI firmware may be rendered inoperative under Windows in the same way that they were when starting Linux under certain circumstances. The experiment to confirm this was successful.”
Trying to ‘prove’ it can be reproduced with Windows actually helps Microsoft dodge blame. Former Novell staff is meanwhile doing Microsoft’s work, too.
Here is one article that says:
The Linux Foundation proudly announced a few hours ago, February 8, that they have officially unleashed the highly anticipated UEFI secure boot system for all Linux distributions, courtesy of the Microsoft Corporation.
James Bottomley, the Director of The Linux Foundation was happy to announce on his blog the immediate availability for download of the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system.
Here is another article about it. Watch former Novell staff revealing Microsoft’s involvement:
As promised, here is the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system. This was actually released to us by Microsoft on Wednesday 6 February, but with travel, conferences and meetings I didn’t really get time to validate it all until today.
SUSE too is organising events, but it is not what it used to be:
Did anybody else notice Novell BrainShare 2013 occurred this week in Salt Lake City? It was a prime opportunity to promote Novell’s progress under Attachmate’s ownership. Plus, SUSE Linux (Novell’s sister business) could have published some updated business milestones of its own. Did Novell and SUSE deliver? Here’s the scorecard.
Alas, the annual Novell user and partner conference generated exactly one Novell press release, no SUSE press releases, one partner release from MessageSolution, one media story in the Salt Lake City Tribune and one on ZDnet.
Now that SUSE depends financially on Microsoft its main goal is to help Microsoft tax GNU/Linux and advance dubious agenda. Some people in the FOSS world do sell out. And we do need to name them, no matter how offensive they may find it. █
“News is something someone doesn’t want printed. All else is advertizing.” –William Randolph Hearst
