Well well well, who would have guessed.
I used to be quite a MS basher but have mellowed in recent years as Gates left, thus letting go of the reins and the FUD and Halloween documents were a fond nostalgic memory of a time when GNU/Linux was so scary and revolutionary to the big wigs, what with windows refund days etc, the creation of Open Source to help rebrand elements of Free Software to win over business execs that care about profit, saving money etc vs freedom.
Then Trusted Computing reared its ugly head, threatening to lock down computers to the point that they would be queried for their trustworthiness as a function of merely browsing to a website, and the big OS giants (OK, giANT) already had cornered the vast majority of PC use thus had no intention on trusting anything other than their own OS. It looked like there was a future where I, a Free Software loving Richard Stallman fanboy was thinking of hoarding "free" motherboards before the d-day of trusted computing made it impossible to run GNU/Linux. I was ready to buy as many boards and cpu's as I could to have spares all my life. I still have a hoard of old laptops recovered form the IT skip where I worked just for this reason. So what, if in 30 years my machine was going to be slow and unable to communicate over the trusted internet? I would be free to use a computer it for my own reasons, offline with spares to last decades.
Then Trusted Computing got its balls kicked in!
As the plans of the giant(s) lay on the floor clutching its nether regions the TPM came out as a mere shadow of what it was supposed to be. Apart from on ARM, MS rules there.
The TPM was required to be under full user control, even turned off if desired. No website today says "Your TPM is not enabled". Now the TPM is a useful cryptographic store and a very good random number generator which adds high quality randomness to Linux's random pool. The user can even create their own certificate chain and self sign anything they wish. As stated in the article, MS even supplied a cert for signing a shim for other OS's to use. Why? Well so that secure boot can be kept on, to help fight the virus', which is one of the reasons why a TPM was wanted in the first place, besides the ability to allow censorship.
But here we go, my old self, the MS bashing one, seem to be more active recently. Sure he was placated by MS loving open source this and that, bash in azure, WSL and more hints of a different MS but he is still a bit of a cynic. The recent announcement of the banning of sale of anything that can be seen as FLOSS on the MS store, with that pathetic attempt to explain it away, rattled him too.
Now we have it all over again. A dominating giant, creating a TPM replacement (why??), blatantly locking out other OS's. Eliminating competition. All very familiar territory. Sure a user can re-enable the third party cert, but for how long? Who is making it clear to MS that this cert, even if disabled, must be supported going forward as a requirement? Or are they merely just going to eventually say "this machine is designed for windows" and wipe their hands of any responsibility of maintaining compatibility when they finally delete the cert for "security reasons".
Microsoft used underhanded tactics against business and school children alike to become the dominant OS on the x68 platform. Competition was driven almost underground, and thats how GNU/Linux looked back then, as an underground breakthrough OS seemingly coming up from beneath the floorboards with MS execs jumping onto tables screaming like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Those days were fun but the execs stopped screaming and started learning up on extermination. Many years later, co-existence looks like the norm, MS being the main dominant choice and GNU/Linux the enthusiast one, which MS was happily bringing parts of into their own offerings.
It feels like the old days again, MS have embraced and extended, now they look like they are setting up the ability to extinguish. WSL may be the only way anything Linux like will run on such machines in the future.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
