Re: grub to help refund of pre-installations

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Tuesday 08 July 2008 07:57:30 Jean-Christophe Haessig wrote:
> Le mardi 08 juillet 2008 à 07:32 +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji a écrit :
>
> <snip>
>
> In fact, you want to write a GRUB module which deciphers a partition
> when given a key. That's no DRM in any way. In the DRM world, users
> don't (and can't) get the real keys.

You are completely right. I don't try to mean that it is a sort of DRM by 
itself. My concern is rather about making it too easy to implement DRM on the 
top of GRUB. For example, if the logic is present, it is very straightforward 
to get a key from somewhere else but an user input (e.g. by using a BIOS 
call), and hide it from the user. I can think of many nasty ways to hide the 
key, even if GRUB is free.

This is feasible technically anyway, by implementing everything, without 
having support functions in the core. However, I am not willing to help such 
effort officially.

Regards,
Okuji