Red Hat deal with Microsoft is a bad idea

@skelband and BernardSwiss.......Oh dear.....mea culpa. Shows how easy it is to misunderstand written English. Sorry about that.....However, assuming that "what if scenario" - it would be very, very nice. The rest of my comments above however, remain intact.....Exits right for quick wrist slap and a glass of red.

Edit....Five days ago, I very nearly bought an Asus laptop, but settled for a Toshiba instead. It can run openSUSE 12.1 perfectly.

skelband wrote:If the likes of Asus decided that they were going to always provide a boot unlock option, regardless of what Ballmer has to say about it, seriously what is Microsoft going to do about it?

Send their "Men in Black" to meet Asus reps at a trade show, and force them to apologize in public.

Exactly what kind of "force" is involved, we observers can only guess.

.........Send their "Men in Black" ..........

maybe we should start a Pingu 5th colomn and send the message, that if we can not play with our hardware as we please, we will make sure they can not play with their hardware as they wish. Attack the tyres of their cars on a daily base Cut the electricity supply to their houses on a daily base Block their water supply on a daily base

Oeps...did I say that ? Oh dear, now I forgot how to delete this texts. Where is that darn delete button.

Please people, just pretend I didn't write this and the page is blank

Thanks

Quoting: How many Android devices can you install Windows 8 on? How many of those devices have an unlocked bootloader?

How many Android devices can be rooted in a trivial fashion,... iOS devices??? Secure boot is a little different than the current run of Android devices.

However, I'm not going to disparage Win8 ARM devices very loudly,... I think the marketplace will do that more than adequately for me...

@f3wt

You seem to be under the misimpression that we don't have a problem with what Android device makers do to lock down their devices from being moved to a different operating system or different version of Android. That's entirely incorrect. We do have a problem with that (I know I do), and we always have. That's why we root our Android devices. We certainly don't want a repeat of that in the PC world where the hardware has been open a long time.

Also, as long as we have to purchase a key from somebody to run another OS, we're not really benefiting from the security feature (and it's a relatively small feature). We only really benefit from Secure Boot if we have the ability to add and remove signatures ourselves with no fees involved. Otherwise Secure Boot is just another tax on our systems.

> As far as I can tell, Asus has actually never been that comfortable away from the Windows fold.

Hah, it's about time they grew a pair and told them where to get off.

But seriously, you have a good point. But at the end of the day, for Asus, it is going to end up being a question of who they wish to upset the least.

This is plainly a move to divide the hardware market. And they (Edit: I mean Microsoft here, sorry) are hoping that it will consolidate their hardware position.

My feeling is that Windows 8 (a la Vista) will flop and the result (wrt "Secure Boot" EFI) will be far from clear.

There is a good amount of competition among electronics manufacturers in the Far East. I don't think MS is going to be able to control all of them. Besides, there are many small ones who don't care about nothing but being able to compete against the big ones and sell their products to whomever with what ever. With or without Secure Boot.

Newegg is big enough, among others, who already sell machines without any OS. I am sure they can and will have devices with no Secure Boot.

Edited: If the major OEMs don't offer devices with no "Secure Boot", or at least switchable, who cares, they will only be hurting their bottom line. I myself stopped buying from them a while back already. I refuse to pay the MS tax.

Quoting:So someone who last month spread the canard that Slackware was in trouble is now calling others delusional.

I didn't spread a "canard". My comments were blown way, way, way out of proportion and things that were attributed to me were things I never said or wrote through much of that. A distro that can't keep their web server, which is their public face, online certainly seems like they are in trouble to me. That was the gist of a blog post that got picked up by the various Linux news portals which in turn resulted in my concerned comments.

I still stand by my original comment on DistroWatch that it's foolish to base a distro on another small distro with a small development team that communicates poorly and that has little or no financial support. Slackware fits that description. I also think the So someone who last month spread the canard that Slackware was in trouble is now calling others delusional. comparison to Mandriva was and is apt. Whatever happens to Mandriva, the company, the distro will live on through forks and through it's development community. That also describes Slackware's situation.

Perhaps if you read my original comments instead of reading what the Slackware community wrote about me you'd know that I was anything but delusional. There are some in that community who still can never forgive the fact that I don't think their distro is perfect and was willing to say so honestly in two reviews.

Quoting:The notorious apologist over increasing business deals with M$, caitlyn, strikes yet again.

Flufferbeer needs to clean the fluff out between the ears. I never was an apologist for Novell and their deal with Microsoft, was I? That deal wasn't justified. This one is if Red Hat wants to remain viable in enterprise space. They aren't the ones who created the environment that they must do business is. Microsoft did, with the complicity of the U.S. government. That's where the blame belongs, not in Raleigh.

I'd write what I really thought of you and your recent comments but I'd be off this site as fast as fewt was.

> There are some in that community who still can never forgive the fact that I don't think their distro is perfect and was willing to say so honestly in two reviews.

No distro is perfect. We agree on that. The exact nature of Slackware's faults, on the other hand...

Some statements made about Slackware in the Distrowatch forums (http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20120416&mode=67) (Individual links are not possible, due to the lack of the same.)

"You remember that comment about my involvement in the development of a Slackware derivative? Forget it. We're already discussing about delaying the release and rebasing off of something with a more secure future,"

"I certainly hope Slackware survives."

"Both Mandriva and Slackware are in financial difficulty." (this, quoting an external blog, http://noctslackv1.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/slackware-needs-...).

And later: "What I will say is that Slackware.com is down and I have very little doubt that the blog writer is accurate about why based on what sources I do have."

Apart from the claim about Mandriva which has been true about that company since 2003, the comments are based on fantasy.

I asked Patrick Volkerding and he was happy to tell me the exact position: http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/54538-sla...

My comments were not fantasy, but I see much of the Slackware community is so blindly loyal that they are willing to accept any fantasy. The decision to rebase was a good one for precisely thereasons states.

@linuxwriter, +1

I agree that some of the continued negative comments about Slackware (:ahem: :ahem: this-never-too-busy-to-comment caitlyn's :ahem: :ahem:) are totally based on fantasy. Besides that itwire response from Pat V there was also that positively EXCELLENT interview with Pat at linuxquestions.org last week. Altogether, i think Pat is still doing a good job of counteracting all the negativity raised against it by a limited f3w FUD-throwing squeeky wheels.

I now expect you-know-who to try putting-down we others who support Sam Varghese's points as soon as she can ;)

-fb

> I agree that some of the continued negative comments about Slackware ... are totally based on fantasy.

Sigh. Look, I use Slackware. It's my distribution of choice, and I've been using it for over 18 years now.

But I'm a single hobbyist user. For me, Slackware gives me the maximum flexibility combined with a solid, fast base on which to build. With Slackware, slackpkg, and sbopkg, I've got pretty much everything I could need and I can still build the things that aren't provided from source as needed. I can even repackage rpm's or deb's from other distros if the need arises. And if anything happens to Slackware, I can easily move to Arch or some other distro as needed with little loss of productivity.

But I'm not a corporation or someone developing another distribution. If I were, I'd use different criteria for determining the best distro. A company needs to know the distro will still be around in five years, and that they can find people to support it if they need them. A developer's needs are similar but not identical. For those people, the primary website of the distribution being down for several days sends out major alarm signals.

Caitlyn isn't writing from the viewpoint of a hobbyist user, and her criteria aren't the same as mine or yours. If you want to argue with her (and I have), argue from her perspective, no yours. She always has sound reasons for her opinions on technical matters.

Even when she's wrong. :)

For flufferbeer it's become personal attack on Caitlyn the last two weeks. I have no clue who he is or why he suddenly hates me but the vitriol of the attacks is there for all to read.

Thank you, jdixon. I have never said Slackware (or Mandriva for that matter) is likely to disappear anytime soon. I was happy to have this all die out after the first week. It's the Slackware community that keeps this debate alive to their detriment. I am beyond understanding why they see perpetuating this discussion is somehow useful.

> It's the Slackware community that keeps this debate alive...

There's an idiot section in every community of any size.

> I am beyond understanding why they see perpetuating this discussion is somehow useful.

Me either. Slackware will demonstrate that either your concerns were unfounded or you were correct. In either case making an issue of it is pointless.

Not one of the actual messages which I posted from the Slackware thread on Distrowatch have been explained. There is a single dismissive "I never said <something_which_was_never_claimed_to_have_been_said>." And there is an attempt to paint all posts to the contrary as emanating due to personal reasons. That's a politician's way of trying to evade a substantive discussion.

Don't change the subject - explain every one of those statements (the accuracy of which can no longer be disputed) and be willing to concede that you were indeed wrong on every count.

For the poster f3wt, who raised the issue of Android, this may be of interest: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/168484/index.html

I think the posts explain themselves quite well. I also elaborated on them on linuxquestions.org ad nauseum. I stand by what I wrote and I believe it to be accurate. I concede nothing other than that the Slackware community is almost as bad as another community I could mention but won't in terms of over-the-top fanboys.

Apple?

/me ducks and runs