On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 10:35:21AM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
It occurs to me that Amstrad don't want to release the keys they've used to sign/encrypt their new code, however the new 5.1 bootloader won't accept unsigned/unenecrypted code, and therefore we get a sort of stalemate.
How would both Amstrad and the open source community here feel about the following proposal?
Amstrad provides a signed/encrypted (whatever is needed to get it to load onto a 5.1 device) copy of the 4.9 bootloader, so that it becomes possible to 'downgrade' a device to a state where we _can_ load our own open source code.
That way Amstrad keeps its keys, but the devices which were released running Linux remain open for us to use as the GPL requires.
I suspect that Amstrad would not be happy with this, since I suspect the main purpose of the encryption was to prevent people using the device other than with their source.