No, the title and "secret agreement" theory is just BS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
>Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
MS hasn't been the boss of anyone much ever since 2005 or so...
Or get those Linux community to organize, and establish some body to create, and secure, keys for Linux that will be installed by default alongside MSs.
As someone who suffered from at least a couple BIOS-based malware back on Windows PCs back in the day, I'm all for securing the bootloaders...
A centralized key is not secure. A secure key is not centralized. If you want any security, the computer owner must be the only person allowed to install keys on the boot sequence - what is the exact opposite of what MS mandates.
A centralized key IS secure, just not AS secure as a not private key.
(That's theoritically: in practice it can be even safer than a private key, because most end users are incompetent in managing their keys much more than the central entity would usually be).
And it's wrong to think it as a key in the sense of a physical key. It actually used as a signature.
You can't have "private signatures" because the very purpose of a signature is to verify that the thing it signs is signed by a specific (and in the case of operating systems, central: the vendor) entity.
An OS the user signs itself is worthless, as the OS data he signed could have come from anywhere or tampered, etc, before the signing.
It is also doing quite well recently in the corporate desktop (see IBM adopting Macs, etc). Heck, they almost dominate the "startup founder/employee" desktop, as well as the "university student" desktop.
Do you have a source for this? I know it's the case with their phones, but they also have a much larger market share there. It's hard for me to believe they get "most of the profits" from the PC market with their minuscule share, especially when their computers are competitively priced.
Apple sells 5% of the world’s PCs and takes home 45% of the profit. (1)
During the recent third quarter, Apple commanded a 7.5 percent share of the computer market, up from 6.9 percent a year ago, IDC said. That was enough to move Apple up to No. 4 in market share for the computer market, pushing past Acer, which is now No. 5. (...) Each of the top five personal computer makers suffered a decline in total shipments, but four — Lenovo, HP, Dell and Apple — all captured a larger share of a shrinking market. (2)
* Apple's total share of the global PC market grew to 7.4 percent in the first quarter of calendar 2016, good for fourth place globally, according to IDC. That's up from 6.7 percent in the same period a year ago. (3)*
In fact Apple has such high per-PC revenues that it’s actually now the third-biggest PC maker by revenue – excluding Dell, because we don’t know what Dell’s revenues are, because it is privately owned. (4)
(1) http://fortune.com/2013/04/16/pie-chart-of-the-day-apples-ov...
(2) http://www.siliconbeat.com/2015/10/09/report-apple-widens-sh...
(3) http://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/192668/apple-grows...
(4) https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/the-deaths-of-...
I think he means about character of those persons, who were something upfront and really creaky behind.
Like BillGates, who have done some bad things in past...
(and, honestly, were finally succeeding at, to the point where I'm very close to willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here: how the hell could the benefits of such a thing come anywhere near to outweighing the amount of damage it would do?)
I remember the lawsuit against TomTom in 2009, because they used the FAT32 filesystem through open source drivers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.
So sure, they want ubuntu to run on windows, so they can get into the container market.
So sure they will sell office in the cloud to target the legions of chromebook users. Not that they would ship office for linux.
Nor would they consider supporting linux on their surface books.
The locking linux out of various platforms with EFI seems to be progressing nicely.
But sure, microsoft will meet you half way to steal your customers and try to find out some other way to lock them into a microsoft platform.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.