On 02/28/2013 12:53 AM, Dale Dellutri wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 6:27 AM, zxq9<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>> There is a silver lining. The board makers themselves are out to sell boards
>> and laptops and tablets and can be reasoned with. My company is an extremely
>> small player in the hardware field but we've had positive response from
>> vendors when inquiring about having our own keys included on boards
>> alongside Microsoft's when doing bulk orders. We haven't had to go that
>> route yet so I'm unsure how much of a pain that would actually be to manage
>> (doesn't appear much more difficult than managing repository keys though,
>> for example), but this leaves the door open for even tiny computing
>> companies and larger IT departments to arrange for their own "secure" boot
>> keys to be pre-installed by the board manufacturers and not violate
>> Microsoft's requirements, even on ARM. That said, since we don't do showroom
>> marketing anyway neither we nor our suppliers have a need to put little
>> "Windows8 Ready" stickers on anything they ship to us anyway.
>
>> ... (SNIPPED) ...
>
> Doesn't this lower the eventual resale value of the laptop?  Doesn't it restrict
> the laptop to run only what either MS wants or what you installed?
>
> I buy refurbished laptops and install Fedora, but I might want to try *BSD or
> Ubuntu or something else in the future.  Doesn't the "silver lining" restrict
> that with these UEFI laptops?

It does indeed lower the overall value to the buyer -- which is why 
we're not satisfied with the concept of "secure boot", even if a board 
maker puts our keys on the device: we want to sell hardware, and 
providing a device the user can do whatever he wants to independent of 
us is a more competitive selling position than selling, essentially, a 
"locked" device.

This is not a good move for the industry for this exact reason. Of 
course, laptop makers think this means they will be able to sell one 
device per instance/OS a user wants -- but especially in the consumer 
space this is wishful thinking.

If standard UEFI situation ever moves from "user disable-able" to 
"always on by default" then every device sold will essentially be a 
locked device that requires jailbreaking to work properly. Offering 
unlocked devices is far more competitive -- but the dialogue of the 
industry has made a mystical security claim that lay users don't 
understand and magically transformed vendor-jailing of devices from a 
usability impediment into a must-have feature.