Dear Linus,
“Say I’m a hardware manufacturer. I decide I love some particular piece of open-source software, but when I sell my hardware, I want to make sure it runs only one particular version of that software, because that’s what I’ve validated. So I make my hardware check the cryptographic signature of the binary before I run it,” Torvalds said. “The GPLv3 doesn’t seem to allow that, and in fact, most of the GPLv3 changes seem to be explicitly designed exactly to not allow the above kind of use, which I don’t think it has any business doing.”
- Imagine, IBM had checked MS-DOS’s signature and refused to run DR-/Novell-/Whatever-DOS…
- Imagine, Hardware-vendors had checked Window’s signature, and refused to run anything other that stuff from Redmond…
Just tell me, please, how would you have created Linux, if you had not been able to run it on that legendary 386 of yours?
Back then, there was no company that had such a strong grip on the market to pull it off. But look at Treacherous Computing, the X-Box and Vista, and you see why a lot of people are afraid of strong DRM, backed by law and license which will take our freedoms away?
I know, you are not the big politician, but it makes perfect sense for software developers to care about the hardware their programms run on. People might be free to sow any seeds they want to, but what good is that freedom, if all land is only sold with a layer of concrete covering it - and there is a law against removing it?
But anyway, thanks for Linux - and with that, I mean much more than the kernel!
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