Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on: Trusting Trusted Computing; New Userspace Load-Balancing Framework; and Ending Big Endian.
Trusting Trusted Computing
There's a fundamental conflict between user and vendor in the commercial world. For example, if the vendor had full control over your system, they'd be able to offer streaming video services without the risk of you copying the stream and sharing the file. On the flip side, that level of control would also allow the vendor to control unrelated ways you wanted to use your system.
The Linux development philosophy – and open source philosophy in general – believes the user should have full control over their system. If a "feature" can't be implemented without taking that control away, then according to that philosophy, the feature simply shouldn't be implemented.
Not surprisingly, this is a controversial topic and a source of tension between Linux developers and commercial enterprises, many of whom contribute truly massive amounts of person hours of development to Linux.
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