Re: grub to help refund of pre-installations

[Robert Millan]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 08:24:33AM +0200, Michael Gorven wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 July 2008 07:32:40 Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> > This news, basically, says that my company will provide a solution to
> > activating pre-installed software in a computer, after entering an access
> > code with cryptography, using GRUB 2.
> 
> I have been working on adding support for encrypted partitions to GRUB2. It 
> includes a generic crypto module with numerous ciphers and hashes, which may 
> be useful to you. My patch[1] is still waiting for further review and for 
> some legal issues to be addressed.

I think what Okuji said means merging it in GRUB 2 is not a prerequisite
for this plan:

<quote>
So, my current plan is to help this work only under the name of my company,
but not as the official maintainer, and I will not incorporate the result
into the official source code. I might check in patches, when they are
generally useful, and nothing with DRM. But the very feature will not be a
part of genuine GRUB, but be provided as a form of a patch. Anyway, GRUB 2
has been developed in the way that third parties can make extensions easily,
so it is not hard to maintain an optional feature externally.
</quote>

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What good is a phone call… if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)