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I'm not philosophically opposed to DRM systems. What I am concerned with is being made a prisoner by my applications. So, if the kernel I run has to be signed by the someone my proprietary application vendor trusts, so that I can view a piece of data provided by a third party, that limits the freedom I have to choose what I put in my kernel. In some circumstances I might be willing to forgo that freedom, but as a general rule I see it as an unfortunate instrustion. Signatures for the purposes of establishing the identity of authors, and the intactness or binary or sources packages. are a seperate issue, I support that entirely... joelja On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Ok, > there's no way to do this gracefully, so I won't even try. I'm going to > just hunker down for some really impressive extended flaming, and my > asbestos underwear is firmly in place, and extremely uncomfortable. > > I want to make it clear that DRM is perfectly ok with Linux! > > There, I've said it. I'm out of the closet. So bring it on... > > I've had some private discussions with various people about this already, > and I do realize that a lot of people want to use the kernel in some way > to just make DRM go away, at least as far as Linux is concerned. Either by > some policy decision or by extending the GPL to just not allow it. > > In some ways the discussion was very similar to some of the software > patent related GPL-NG discussions from a year or so ago: "we don't like > it, and we should change the license to make it not work somehow". > > And like the software patent issue, I also don't necessarily like DRM > myself, but I still ended up feeling the same: I'm an "Oppenheimer", and I > refuse to play politics with Linux, and I think you can use Linux for > whatever you want to - which very much includes things I don't necessarily > personally approve of. > > The GPL requires you to give out sources to the kernel, but it doesn't > limit what you can _do_ with the kernel. On the whole, this is just > another example of why rms calls me "just an engineer" and thinks I have > no ideals. > > [ Personally, I see it as a virtue - trying to make the world a slightly > better place _without_ trying to impose your moral values on other > people. You do whatever the h*ll rings your bell, I'm just an engineer > who wants to make the best OS possible. ] > > In short, it's perfectly ok to sign a kernel image - I do it myself > indirectly every day through the kernel.org, as kernel.org will sign the > tar-balls I upload to make sure people can at least verify that they came > that way. Doing the same thing on the binary is no different: signing a > binary is a perfectly fine way to show the world that you're the one > behind it, and that _you_ trust it. > > And since I can imaging signing binaries myself, I don't feel that I can > disallow anybody else doing so. > > Another part of the DRM discussion is the fact that signing is only the > first step: _acting_ on the fact whether a binary is signed or not (by > refusing to load it, for example, or by refusing to give it a secret key) > is required too. > > But since the signature is pointless unless you _use_ it for something, > and since the decision how to use the signature is clearly outside of the > scope of the kernel itself (and thus not a "derived work" or anything like > that), I have to convince myself that not only is it clearly ok to act on > the knowledge of whather the kernel is signed or not, it's also outside of > the scope of what the GPL talks about, and thus irrelevant to the license. > > That's the short and sweet of it. I wanted to bring this out in the open, > because I know there are people who think that signed binaries are an act > of "subversion" (or "perversion") of the GPL, and I wanted to make sure > that people don't live under mis-apprehension that it can't be done. > > I think there are many quite valid reasons to sign (and verify) your > kernel images, and while some of the uses of signing are odious, I don't > see any sane way to distinguish between "good" signers and "bad" signers. > > Comments? I'd love to get some real discussion about this, but in the end > I'm personally convinced that we have to allow it. > > Btw, one thing that is clearly _not_ allowed by the GPL is hiding private > keys in the binary. You can sign the binary that is a result of the build > process, but you can _not_ make a binary that is aware of certain keys > without making those keys public - because those keys will obviously have > been part of the kernel build itself. > > So don't get these two things confused - one is an external key that is > applied _to_ the kernel (ok, and outside the license), and the other one > is embedding a key _into_ the kernel (still ok, but the GPL requires that > such a key has to be made available as "source" to the kernel). > > Linus > > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ > -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joel Jaeggli Academic User Services joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu -- PGP Key Fingerprint: 1DE9 8FCA 51FB 4195 B42A 9C32 A30D 121E -- In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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