[Gllug] He who controls the bootloader

[David Damerell]

On Tuesday, 28 Aug 2001, Formi wrote:
> I suppose that most of you have read this.
> For the few who haven't.
> This is a REALLY interesting article in Linux Today.

So interesting that the URL must remain secret?

http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1115/byt20010824s0001/0827_hacker.html

[It's not in Linux Today, either.]

> After reading it, I have something to say, IBM, Sun and all those
> huge companies that say they support linux completely....

Sun say they support Linux completely? News to me.

A potted summary of the article is that it asserts that you cannot buy
dual-boot Windows/Linux boxes from the big PC vendors because
Microsoft impose restrictive conditions on them to prevent bundling
any other OS; this also prevented the release of dual boot
BeOS/Windoze bozes.

It's a nice conspiracy theory, but suffers (like most conspiracy
theories) from a total lack of positive evidence; the lack of
dual-boot systems is interesting, but I can think of an explanation
straight off; the large PC vendors shipping Linux systems see them as
aimed at the server space, where you're highly unlikely to want to
dual boot so you can play Serious Sam on your Web server. The place
where dual boot machines really appeal is in the home consumer market,
and they may reckon (correctly) that people there prefer to install
Linux themselves - hence the lack of even single-boot Linux consumer
machines.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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