Stefan Mileschin

OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has waded into Red Hat and Canonical over the way that the pair have reacted to Microsoft's introduction of "secure" boot.

De Raadt told ITWIre that the pair wanted to be the "new Microsoft" which in open sauce language can be translated to mean "your mother swims after troop ships".

De Raadt said he had no plans to allow his precious OpenBSD to play nice with the Windows 8 secure boot. He said that he will will watch the disaster unfold and hope that someone with enough power or influence sees sense.

Microsoft claims that Windows 8 has said that a "secure" boot process will be needed to boot the operating system on any platform. This needs keys to be used at two stages to recognise what is being loaded. The process is done through the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, or UEFI.

While there will be a method to turn off this booting on x86 hardware it will not work on the ARM platform.

De Raadt thinks that the European anti-trust regulators will go mental when "secure" boot is released in Europe.

He thinks that there could be many laptop vendors locked out of European markets by regulators by the secure boot restrictions.

He dubbed Red Hat and Canonical as traitors to the cause by coming to an arrangement with Vole.

He said that they were doing it mostly mostly for the money and power and they want to be the new Microsoft.

Red Hat's method is to sign up to the Microsoft developer program and obtain a key which will be used to sign a "shim" bootloader.

This shim would then load the GRUB2 bootloader which will boot the operating system kernel, which will also be signed. Since the first key comes from Microsoft, it will be recognised by most PCs and laptops.

Canonical's cunning plan is to have key which is distribution-specific in the firmware, and also a key blessed by Vole.

http://news.techeye.net/software/red...en-sauce-cause