Red Hat Pays MS Ransom Demands

No mention of the fact that to obtain the 'Ready for Windows' certification (or whatever they'll call it) for x86 platforms, OEMs must offer the option to disable secure boot.

ARM doesn't have the same requirements, but phone manufactures have been doing this for years anyway so it's not an MS issue.

That sounds pretty monopolistic to me. So because you are the dominant player in the market, and you know all manufacturers want your OS, you make it so any other OS vendor has to pay you for the right to use that OS on the "Windows-blessed" machines?

That sounds like a pretty scary future to me, and I don't like that Microsoft is getting away with abusing their monopoly power like this.

Red Hat is officially a billion company and it makes this real money not from consumers but from small to medium sized corporations giving them a bargain basement end-to-end OS solution.

It is not hard imagine that RH votes only with its pocket book and is "happy" to join the mutual extortion racket which modern intellectual property purveyors seem to have become.

This is on top of RH knuckling-under to Apple's patent extortion by removing the Launchy Launch-bar.

Should open source advocated be cheering RH in any fashion now?