Palladium 2.0

Summary: UEFI draws complaints but not from Microsoft Linux and its patrons

SUSE is sponsored by Microsoft to solidify a 'Linux tax' on servers running GNU/Linux. This causes all sorts of issues in the so-called 'community' which got labelled "OpenSUSE" and a SUSE employee discusses the issue (as Attachmate staff, not a community member). To quote:

On the openSUSE Factory mailing list a bikeshed was started talking about how 'SUSE controls openSUSE' (see my earlier blog about bikesheds).

The parent company is all about proprietary software (Attachmate has no free/open source products) and the products it inherits from Novell are the same [1, 2, 3].

We find it quite telling that amid the submission of two whitepapers about Microsoft's UEFI abuses [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Novell/Attachmate/SUSE are nowhere to be found. Canonical, which is much smaller, got involved and so did Red Hat, obviously. To quote a good report from SJVN:

The Linux Foundation and friends are working on using UEFI so that computers can be both more secure and give users freedom of operating system choice instead of using Microsoft’s secure boot plan to lock users into Windows 8.

Notice the UEFI complaint. Novell is not in it and Attachmate is also absent. Well, we put some links about this whole story yesterday, but we did not address the angle about Novell's absence. Here are some more reports:

• Linux Foundation, Canonical and Red Hat Weigh In On Secure Boot

  There’s been some hubbub lately about Secure Boot, a hardware-verified, malware-free operating system bootstrap process that aims to improve the overall security of computers. Part of the UEFI specification which is slated to replace the aging BIOS with which many of us are familiar, Secure Boot can forbid the loading and execution of unsigned operating systems. Microsoft is requiring that Secure Boot be activated and enforced for any OEM systems that want to use the 'Designed for Windows 8' logo. The nature of the technology, and Microsoft’s recommended implementation of it, could remove control of the overall system from the end user, and in this configuration Secure Boot may prevent Free Software operating systems from loading.





• Making UEFI Secure Boot Work With Open Platforms





• Canonical and Red Hat Join Forces to Stop Secure Boot

Novell/SUSE must be too busy in bed with Ballmer. This is again why we encourage people to ostracise them. It helps the "real" vendors of GNU/Linux. ⬆