[olug] What if USB no longer worked on Mac's or Linux?

[William E. Kempf]

On Sun, September 19, 2004 6:17 pm, Dave Thacker said:
> Hey, It could happen.   And it doesn't seem all that farfetched to me as a
> business strategy.  Read I, Cringley's column.
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040916.html
>
> This gives MS a great opp0rtunity.  I'll impersonate Steve Ballmer for a
> minute. "You've been bashing us for years because we were not secure
> enough.
> We've listened to what you've said.  We value security so highly that we
> want
> to make sure only devices that we've approved work with our new secure
> OS."
>
> Sure sounds good, unless you're on the outside.

I don't buy it.  Admittedly, I'm more familiar with software standards
than hardware standards, but I'd have to assume they were the same in this
regard: in order to be standards they have to be open and unencumbered
from licensing fees.  So this should only mean that the Linux crowd has to
implement new drivers for this new hardware standard.  No harm no foul.

But, let's assume that I'm wrong on that one, and MS has some how defined
a "closed standard", for which the Linux crowd will be unable to legally
produce drivers.  Hardware manufacturers will be reluctant to give up this
significant market share.  Linux may still be trailing Windows
significantly, but there is enough of an installed base that there's
actually hardware companies making money by building exclusively for
Linux, such as pcHDTV.  Sure, there are some hardware builders that
totally ignore this market sector and seem to be Linux agnostic... but
there are just as many that delight in the added market revenue (this
includes some that are reluctant to develop drivers because of the cost of
support, but who are still mighty glad for the extra revenue).  These
companies are not going to be happy with a "closed standard" that effects
their bottom line.  They would push back on something like that, and would
attempt to work around MS in any way that they could.  Like, for instance,
producing USB devices that work just fine with older drivers, just with
out MS's touted security, or work securely with MS's driver scheme.

Further, MS does not have a history of making obsolete hardware. (You can
argue that Win95 obsoleted a lot of ocmputers because of the more powerful
hardware it required to run on... but that's not really true.  It would
run on the older CPUs, provided there was enough RAM, it just ran like a
dog.  I'm unaware of a single time in history in which hardware was
actually rendered incompatible.)  The article suggests they'd do this by
making older devices read only... but that's still something way beyond
anything MS has ever done.  It's more likely that the OS would have a
configurable option that would allow these legacy devices to be used, with
said option being secured so that network admins could prevent the user
from changing it on secured networks.  If that's the case, you won't see
all USB devices replaced in the time frame given by this article, since
there just won't be enough incentive by home users to replace their legacy
hardware.

This article just seems paranoid to me.  I simply don't buy that MS
*could* acoomplish this, much less would.

-- 
William E. Kempf
wekempf at cox.net