IBM Hates Computer Freedom. This Means Red Hat Too is an Enemy of Software Freedom.
Older:
- Reminder That Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Is Not Free, And It's Because of IBM
- How Much IBM Really Cares About Software Freedom (Exactly One Year Ago IBM Turned RHEL Into Proprietary Software)
- If You Care About Freedom, Don't Follow IBM Red Hat (Like Microsoft Novell 20 Years Ago)
Also in video: IBM and the War (on General-Purpose Computing)
I've been following IBM since I was a child (IBM was extremely dominant back then). IBM was revered/awed by many and back then, in the 1980s or in the age of mainframes and expensive "IBM" (not IBM-compatible) hardware it was made abundantly clear IBM would use trademarks, patents and whatever else it could get a hold of to destroy competitors. As pointed out earlier this week, the term "FUD" was created to explain IBM's tactics. About 15 years ago we slammed IBM for monopolistic land grab in mainframes, edging out anything resembling a rival. In years to come we'd also routinely blast IBM for lobbying in favour of software patents, even in India (IBM was on the same side as Microsoft with patent policy).
Right now IBM uses Fedora, which it controls tightly, to advance very malicious agenda as we explained about a week ago. If you're in favour of Software Freedom, IBM isn't on your side. By extension, Red Hat and Fedora are the same.
A summary of Fedora's position when it comes to "attestation": (Liam has summarised it)
There's a similar post on the Fedora forum from Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta, where they initially noted they weren't actually aware of it. However, in a follow-up post they said:I’m not sure it requires telemetry.
I’m now aware of a similar legislation in Colorado.I really don’t want to get over my skis and speculate too much. But I’m hopeful that the biggest impact for the entire ecosystem is that we figure out a way to have an OS local API that applications can choose to query.. and ask the OS what age bracket the current user is… and then the application is able to make UI/UX choices based on the OS provided information.
I think the point is to not have to have all the applications have to figure out how to ask for age information individually. The point I think is to ensure age information can be part of OS account creation and applications can query the OS to determine which age bucket a user is in. No telemetry… just a way for applications to query the OS… a local API… sounds a lot like a dbus service to me.
So what I am envisioning in my head is a family desktop computer… where the parents are the administrators.. and they create an account for their kid. When they create an account, the OS needs to have a way for them to optionally indicate the age bucket for the human associated with the account. Applications then could choose to query the OS concerning the age bucket and make UI/UX adjustments based on the age bucket info the OS returns.
Again I’m still coming up to speed on these pieces of legislation, and I still need to have more discussions with people. What I think is being mandated by legislation is making sure OSes have a documented way for applications to query for the age bucket information for the user. Do not take that as binding understanding, that is my current understanding based on what I’m reading currently in terms of editorial interpretation of the legislation that I can find. There’s work to do here to get clarity on that.
End of the day.. this might be a simple as extending how we currently map uid to usernames and group membership and having a new file in /etc/ that keeps up with age. It might be as simple as that and we extend the administrative cli and gui tools to populate that file as part of account creation. That might be simplest and it solves the problem for the full ecosystem of linux OSes. Then applications just have to start choosing to look at the file.
Why does IBM even participate in this? Yes, Spaleta works for IBM; so his "master" and his words are IBM's "100% of the time".
They also work to mandate restricted boot and TPMs [1, 2]. To them, "security" means "we remotely control all your computing". █
Image source: Entropy 2