coldtea 9 years ago

>So they did lie when they said "Microsoft Loves Linux".

No, the title and "secret agreement" theory is just BS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

>Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

MS hasn't been the boss of anyone much ever since 2005 or so...

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

  • rndgermandude 9 years ago

    Then why did a Lenovo employee say there is an agreement? http://imgur.com/a/niewu

    • akx 9 years ago

      They might be misguided. Until there's an official announcement one way or another, I wouldn't pay too much attention to some random Lenovo customer service guy.

      • Sylos 9 years ago

        Right, but there isn't going to be an official announcement, unless a hundred thousand people jump to premature conclusions and bring out their pitchforks. I agree that it's not terribly smart to draw a conclusion at this point in time, but it's potentially more malicious, if we don't.

        • sevensor 9 years ago

          Regardless of whether such an agreement exists, and regardless of whether it's a secret if it does exist, I still have my pitchfork out. Lenovo had already lost my good will for their various other shenanigans over the last couple of years, but locking down the machine in a way that makes it impossible to install an alternative OS has decisively lost them my business.

    • DanBC 9 years ago

      Because some support people don't have a clue what they're talking about?

    • coldtea 9 years ago

      Because he has no clue? He is a tech support person ("product expert") answering forums questions.

  • pikzel 9 years ago

    "of course Apple and Sun can sell computers, but not to the two most lucrative markets for computers, namely, the corporate desktop and the home computer." - Joel Spolsky, 2004

    • coldtea 9 years ago

      Well, with around 8-10% today (9.6% according to StatCounter), Apple which targets higher-end, higher-margins gets most of the profits from the home computer market, at least in the US.

      It is also doing quite well recently in the corporate desktop (see IBM adopting Macs, etc). Heck, they almost dominate the "startup founder/employee" desktop, as well as the "university student" desktop.

      • forgetsusername 9 years ago

        >gets most of the profits from the home computer market, at least in the US.

        Do you have a source for this? I know it's the case with their phones, but they also have a much larger market share there. It's hard for me to believe they get "most of the profits" from the PC market with their minuscule share, especially when their computers are competitively priced.

        • coldtea 9 years ago

          Source? It has been reported again and again, along with the relevant stats. Examples:

          Apple sells 5% of the world’s PCs and takes home 45% of the profit. (1)

          During the recent third quarter, Apple commanded a 7.5 percent share of the computer market, up from 6.9 percent a year ago, IDC said. That was enough to move Apple up to No. 4 in market share for the computer market, pushing past Acer, which is now No. 5. (...) Each of the top five personal computer makers suffered a decline in total shipments, but four — Lenovo, HP, Dell and Apple — all captured a larger share of a shrinking market. (2)

          * Apple's total share of the global PC market grew to 7.4 percent in the first quarter of calendar 2016, good for fourth place globally, according to IDC. That's up from 6.7 percent in the same period a year ago. (3)*

          In fact Apple has such high per-PC revenues that it’s actually now the third-biggest PC maker by revenue – excluding Dell, because we don’t know what Dell’s revenues are, because it is privately owned. (4)

          (1) http://fortune.com/2013/04/16/pie-chart-of-the-day-apples-ov...

          (2) http://www.siliconbeat.com/2015/10/09/report-apple-widens-sh...

          (3) http://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/192668/apple-grows...

          (4) https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/the-deaths-of-...

  • 0x0 9 years ago

    Isn't the Microsoft key the only mandatory key in UEFI Secure Boot? So I guess they are still the boss of the (non-Apple) modern x86 PC architecture.

    • coldtea 9 years ago

      So, add a distro's keys (to the firmware) or use a distro signed with the default (MS) key.

      Or get those Linux community to organize, and establish some body to create, and secure, keys for Linux that will be installed by default alongside MSs.

      As someone who suffered from at least a couple BIOS-based malware back on Windows PCs back in the day, I'm all for securing the bootloaders...

      • marcosdumay 9 years ago

        Or get to learn something about key management.

        A centralized key is not secure. A secure key is not centralized. If you want any security, the computer owner must be the only person allowed to install keys on the boot sequence - what is the exact opposite of what MS mandates.

        • coldtea 9 years ago

          >Or get to learn something about key management. A centralized key is not secure. A secure key is not centralized.

          A centralized key IS secure, just not AS secure as a not private key.

          (That's theoritically: in practice it can be even safer than a private key, because most end users are incompetent in managing their keys much more than the central entity would usually be).

          And it's wrong to think it as a key in the sense of a physical key. It actually used as a signature.

          You can't have "private signatures" because the very purpose of a signature is to verify that the thing it signs is signed by a specific (and in the case of operating systems, central: the vendor) entity.

          An OS the user signs itself is worthless, as the OS data he signed could have come from anywhere or tampered, etc, before the signing.

          • coldtea 9 years ago

            Correction: "A centralized key IS secure, just not AS secure as a private key".

  • looserof7 9 years ago

    >Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

    I think he means about character of those persons, who were something upfront and really creaky behind.

    Like BillGates, who have done some bad things in past...

Piskvorrr 9 years ago

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Hello again MS, for a moment I was getting worried about you straying from your proven strategy.

  • jewbacca 9 years ago

    Seriously. If this does turn out to be intentional on Microsoft's part, then there goes every last shred of trust and goodwill they've spent the last 10 years rebuilding.

    (and, honestly, were finally succeeding at, to the point where I'm very close to willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here: how the hell could the benefits of such a thing come anywhere near to outweighing the amount of damage it would do?)

    • Piskvorrr 9 years ago

      Meh. For me, the last drop was "You WANT the X, admit it! (Not like you have a choice, we force-upgraded your computer anyway, no matter what you chose)" This is just Business As Usual.

f_m_9 9 years ago

They love Linux ..as long as you only use it through their products..

ashitlerferad 9 years ago

The love Linux... as long as Linux users pay their patent fees

sliken 9 years ago

Heh, well there's a small footnote. Microsoft loves Linux users.

So sure, they want ubuntu to run on windows, so they can get into the container market.

So sure they will sell office in the cloud to target the legions of chromebook users. Not that they would ship office for linux.

Nor would they consider supporting linux on their surface books.

The locking linux out of various platforms with EFI seems to be progressing nicely.

But sure, microsoft will meet you half way to steal your customers and try to find out some other way to lock them into a microsoft platform.

Fice 9 years ago

They do not love or hate Linux, open source, or anything, they just do whatever makes more money. It's business.