Support the FSF: Help us stop Restricted Boot

I wish the best of luck to FSF in stopping this. I don't have much I can donate, but I hope my little bit of support will help them.

I love how Windows RT devices which are struggling to ship a couple million are "ARM devices" but there is absolutely no mention of tens of millions of iPads, Kindle and some other Android tablets being sold with locked bootloaders.

Same with phones, are WP8 phones with a 3.5% marketshare(albeit increasing) a much bigger threat to user and software freedom than iPhones? Atleast with Microsoft you have the choice of OEMs, whereas with Apple you have no freedom of choosing the manufacturer. I think mentioning Apple undermines their point in such a serious way that the FSF(and Mozilla) hasn't mentioned it any of their long blog posts on Secure Boot.

Also, with the PCs sold being mandated by Microsoft to have a way for an end user to disable Secure Boot and Add/Remove their own keys, the user is completely in control and can even remove Microsoft's key if they so wish.

US $350,000 is a LOT of money to waste going after this, imagine what could be done with that money if it was spent on things like OpenOffice, Samba and other projects sorely lacking in money and resources. I think this is an exercise in baiting Microsoft haters part with their money rather than any productive exercise to increase computing freedom. I hope donators consider better uses of their money.

Despite this tarnished image of a former tech-innovist, does the FSF really still feel it's impossible to fight the root evil here because of public perception?

Is it only picking on Microsoft because that is easier to amass support against?

We, as hackers and developers, should support this. We should fight closed systems. We should fight against the forces against general purpose computing (Cory Doctorow has a nice speach on this) and we should fight those who seek to criminalize writing code because somewhere some troll has a vague patent with no implementation covering your work.

So yes. Support the FSF on this. But also boycot those who are the chief offenders here. Every dollar spent in an Apple-store is money spent against the core of your profession. Stop spending money there. And throw away your iPhones and Macbooks. They are bad karma and software blood-money.

I have very mixed feelings about this very topic. As a developer, I completely agree with you. Hardware should be hackable and software replaceable.

But there's also another side: computing has become a lot easier for the average user. E.g. the iPhone and the iPad were the first computers that my mother really grasped and was able to use comfortably on her own. The limited walled garden approach to computing ensures that she doesn't accidentally install malware, etc. In the end, I think the secure, walled gardens are useful to the average user.

Of course, the inherent danger is unfair competition - the gatekeeper can decide to reject software whenever it wants and impose fees and crazy rules. Since in EU, we are not completely adverse to government intervention, I think it is best that the European union would regulate such walled gardens, e.g. by limiting the percentage that the gatekeeper can charge, by requiring that the gatekeeper accepts all software that is not malicious, and requiring that a method should be required to unlock hardware. I that putting think such regulations into place will be much more effective than fighting windmills.