FSF Criticises Ubuntu For Dropping Grub 2 For Secure Boot

sfcrazy writes "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published a whitepaper suggesting how free operating systems can deal with UEFI secure boot. In the whitepaper, the foundation has criticized the approach Canonical/Ubuntu has taken to deal with the problem. The paper reads: 'It is not too late to change. We urge Ubuntu and Canonical to reverse this decision, and we offer our help in working through any licensing concerns. We also hope that Ubuntu, like Fedora, will actively support users generating and using their own signing keys to run and share any versions of the software, and not require users to install a key from Canonical to get the full benefit of their operating system.'"

Comments

Re:I suppose the ultimate solution is...

[SuricouRaven]

You can now, yes. But remember the big push for Secure Boot is from Microsoft. A company with a long history of using every dirty and underhanded trick in the book, including a few of their own invention. I do not trust them: Today they only make it enabled by default, but in a few more years they may take away the capability to disable it entirely.

Atom

[mdmkolbe]

they may take away the capability to disable it entirely

They already are taking it away on ARM based systems. "On an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable Custom Mode. ... Disabling Secure MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems" (page 122 of Windows Hardware Certification Requirements)

Re:They also criticized Fedora..

[Lennie]

AMD commited last year for all their products to support Core Boot:

http://blogs.amd.com/work/2011/05/05/an-update-on-coreboot/