Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Joel Jaeggli
2003-04-24T04:33:26Z

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
>
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