All Windows 8 licensed hardware will be shipping with secure boot enabled by default in their replacement for the BIOS, Unfied Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). So far, so good, who doesn’t want more security? The fly in the soup is that by default only Windows 8 will run on these systems, so no Linux, no BSD, heck, no Windows XP for that matter. Fedora Linux, Red Hat’s community distribution, has found a way: sign up with Microsoft, via Verisign to make their own Windows 8 system compatible UEFI secure boot key. A lot of Linux people hate this compromise. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has another take: “I’m certainly not a huge UEFI fan, but at the same time I see why you might want to have signed bootup etc. And if it’s only $99 to get a key for Fedora, I don’t see what the huge deal is.”

Linus Torvalds on Windows 8, UEFI, and Fedora. More >