dasein wrote: But you have to ask yourself if you truly imagine that all mobo vendors are really going to forgo the always-growing Linux server market to chase after a dwindling Windows desktop market.
Fair point. I keep forgetting Windows' downward-spiral in the market. Since Windows desktops dominate my workplace, and the average competency level of my coworkers is painful at times, I often forget how Windows may fade into obsolescence, albeit plenty of people in charge of finances still swear by them.
Remember that the news piece is merely reporting that MSFT is no longer requiring that SecureBoot be something that end users can bypass. Nothing is preventing an OEM from shipping a bypass-able SecureBoot. Now, will some OEMs shoot themselves in the foot out of laziness/sloppiness? Probably. Especially on laptops? Wouldn't be at all surprising.
True, but this could also be said of many Android phones on the market. Maybe I'm trying to articulate the long-term implications of this move. I'll flesh-out in detail (because I have the day off) what really should have been my original point: that it's not so much this one instance of Windows or manufacturers locking-out alternative solutions, but a larger trend of tying consumers' hands behind their backs, and buyers willingly approaching technology with their wrists pressed together. tl;dr, I argue that consumer choice will dictate our own ability to choose in the future.
Before I begin my tirade, I must remind or inform the reader that 99.9% of my interactions with people offline are people who do not understand, or do not care to understand, their technology; so my perspective natrually reflects this overwhelming majority. People were swept off their feet when they saw me printing from a USB drive on the school printer, despite this same printer having been in the same spot for almost six years. People who forget, despite weekly instruction, how to change their desktop wallpaper. On a Windows 7 computer. I feel like Lacan when I say that I can get to the heart of my point only after a long detour.
Does anyone remember the excited optimism of open-source many developers and open-source advocates when Google announced that their mobile operating system would be based on Linux? (I do, and maybe not in this community, but there definitely was promise). In the past, loading a custom firmware image was trivial, and in some cases part of the appeal for buying an Android phone over an Apple one.
Yet as time has passed (and as one could easily expect), it seems that more and more manufacturers deliberately clamp-down on this: for instance, by locking bootloaders. Anything not christened by a large corporation is branded unsafe for use. Samsung is one of many that locked-out the S3 not long ago for this reason. Another example, Motorola allows user to unlock their phones; but they must first register their phones -- to the Google-owned Motorola -- to receive a "bootloader unlock" key. Although the rationale of "voided warranty" is fair, one could easily see that the bootloader is unlocked because it changes the entire initiral loading screen to red text on a white background warning the user that the bootloader is unlocked; so Google's method is more like a "dancing monkey" treatment of the open-source community. Then there's the VPN message on stock firmware which displays "OMG YOUR INTERNET IS BEING EAVESDROPPED THIS IS IN NO WAY SAFE", although a similar message is nowhere to be found when you link all of your social networking, email, bank account information, etc. to the same device.
In the smartphone realm, advocates of open-source technology and unique security approaches are routinely pissed on, and the official rationale always seems to mirror the same approach that Apple began not long ago; because the end user is stupid*, it is profitable to lock-up the full potential of devices and justify it as a security method. That's the type of approach I anticipate laptop manufacturers, given the liberty to lock-out anything but the default OS, will bandwagon. I can envision maybe a minority of laptop lines which cater to alternative OSes (after all, the profitability of being "the" Linux laptop could be significant; the relationship between the Google Nexus and Cyanogenmod blossomed nicely because of this), but I really don't believe that the current luxury of interfacing with your parents' computer using a live USB disk [to weed-out the malware which entered their computing environment due to the Windows] will carry into the future (or, if it does, then only by proficient hackers).
So, buy a dumb-phone, right? Problem solved, stop getting off-topic.
Sure, that's an ideal solution, but the current smartphone trend shows how indifferent most consumers
choose to remain when the inner-workings of their intrastructures are obfuscated by a flashy GUI, great advertisement, and the promise of heightened security. By the way, how are tablets doing? How are tablet-laptop hybrids are starting to look on the market? For anyone who hasn't tried, tablets are often about as easy to hack around as smartphones. How's ChromeOS looking (and is it any safer to install Linux**)? People seem to love it; in fact, we just received eight cartloads of them from a grant. And how are Gnome3 and Unity looking, despite the systemd-related lock-outs of the former, and
shameless data-mining-tactics of the latter? People
love convenience and sexualized technology; and just like the auto industry banked off sleek cars, so too are manufacturers of mobile technolgoy reaping the financial rewards of their target demographics.
As these social patterns dominate consumer choices, I hold a vision of the current Linux ecosystem's survival which is blurred with doubt. The "mothership" distros are more-or-less systemd, which is driving users towards other distros or BSD etc.; as the gaps between tablet and laptop bridge, so too will the caveats which define each; and, like I said at the beginning, the tablet-smarphone OEMs aren't exactly FOSS-friendly. All the while, I don't believe it far from the truth to safely assume that people en masse just won't give a crap about whether some group of tech nerds gets to use something besides Windows. I also don't feel it far from the truth to safely assume that "buyer's choice" for anyone who deviates from a manufactuerer's target audience will streamline available mobile device choices, and that those, too, could easily die out for trivial reasons.
To be fair, I'm not so pessimistic that I believe all laptops are damned behind unbreakable walls of proprietary technology. But I also see, over and over again, that so many manufacturers will take, not the opportunity, but the
initiative to block consumers, who don't care one way or another, from actively breaking their impositions. That, in my opinion, will prove to be a significant turning point for this ecosystem: whether the buying habits of the overwhelming many will dictate the innovative privileges of us few.
*Also, I must end with a note of clarification. Because of many discussions with everyday people, I don't believe that most people
want to remain ignorant when it comes to issues like these. It's usually that most people default to wilful ignorance because of other priorities in life, or they don't know because no one in their life has cared enough about the subject to tell them.
** I know I had the source for this statement bookmarked, but it went out with my old hard drive, so I'll keep looking for it. In short, Crouton invites some security concerns which were detailed in a healthy read, which I think was on Github.
