fedora 18 bootloader
 

Just can't help but think about all those people that made donations/contributions at one point or another...
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/re...8-pcs-2012061/

Hardly (new) news.
I was a bit shocked when I originally read Matthews blog, but this is what happens when one company has a near monopoly.

Lucky the original proposal to make (Microsoft owned) keys mandatory and not disable-able got successfully fought.
I would expect the other mega distro makers to have to follow suit eventually.

Not this again. They even admit that the title is wrong later in the article (they are NOT paying Microsoft).
I wonder what people expected? Fedora is NOT a community distro, it is the testbed for a commercial Linux distribution, nothing more. And since Secure Boot will unarguably be a requirement sooner or later for any larger company buying new machines (which is not bad at all, since it actually makes machines more secure) Red Hat has to go this way if they want to stay in the competition. Ubuntu, also backed up by a commercial entity, will do the same (they already announced that).
If that bothers you, just don't use Ubuntu or Fedora, load your own key into the hardware and sign the OS/bootloader/kernel of your choice with it. Or simply disable Secure Boot.

whether secure boot is good or bad or can be turned on or off is for some other place

the one big issue is one company with a very bad track record of " playing nice" with others
has control of ALL the keys

Yes, they have some keys. In no way ALL of the keys. And as soon as Secure Boot is distributed widely they don't have the ability anymore to misuse their might. They can't just blacklist Red Hat or Ubuntu suddenly for fun, because they will have to face serious consequences. Want to blacklist Red Hat? Wait, that will bring down the NYSE and many computers of the armed forces. It doesn't work as simple as most people think, because they can't selectively shut only only a few computers down, it is an all or nothing thing.
Besides that, everyone that really has fears that something like that will happen will easily be able to just turn secure boot off or use their own keys.
This "Oh, now they have all the keys!" thing is not true and in my eyes nothing more than FUD.

they can not block everything
but oops'es ???



then why did Microsoft list
"donate.fsf.org" as a "gambling site "
and block people from donating to the free software foundation on windows networks

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/d...-gambling-site

Ooopses would be very damaging to Microsoft's image. Or would you trust an OS developer to run your mission critical systems if they aren't even handle to run a signing service? Also, you can be sure that there would be at least one entity, be it the FSF or anyone else, that would instantly sue Microsoft and they don't need another antitrust trial. Oh, and may be the NYSE or anyone else running Red Hat would also go down (or not come up in the morning), which would not be very good for a stock company in general and especially if it is the company that brings the stock market down.

Dead link.
Funny, I can visit that site from my Vista system and I really doubt that I can't donate. I am currently short on money, otherwise I would just give it a try.
But anyways, what has this to do with preventing to run other OSes? How should that give them any use? Microsoft is currently having serious problems on the markets in India, Russia and China, which are the biggest markets on this planet. Especially when it comes to China, do you really think such a behavior as blocking out other OSes will do them any good?
The marketing department and the shareholders will blast Steve Ballmer into the orbit if he even thinks about this.

the link is not dead
it works just fine
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/d...-gambling-site

Of course, after you corrected it. In my quoted text from you it is still not working. But anyways, I can't see why this is related to the discussion. The entry in the database (that consists several million entries, I would guess) is already corrected. This has nothing to do with a few keys they have to manage.

Actually, the only pure community distributions that I know about are Linux From Scratch, Debian, Centos, Scientific Linux, Mint and many others.
And needless to say, all the distributions from A to Z and 0 to 9 work with and rely on the communities. Both UBUNTU and Red Hat are commercial versions. Pretty soon UBUNTU will ask for money to support their development. Developers need some candies to enjoy.