No Time To Play

Software developers are willing to put up with a lot for the chance to earn a little money. (Hello, Web agencies!) This is most visible in the iPhone market, which has two very onerous barriers to entry:

1. you have to own a Mac and
2. you must pay a $99 developer fee just to test your own apps on the device you bought honestly.

Despite these obstacles, the official Apple app store has enjoyed a veritable gold rush (which, like in history, has benefitted few people, often not those who took risks and toiled). This may have something to do with the fact that many developers already own a Mac, and you can at least develop your app without asking for permission.

This is not a given, however.

A little while ago, Microsoft has announced that when Windows 8 comes to market in 2012, OEMs will not be allowed to preinstall the OS unless the machine supports a feature called Secure Boot. That means your machine will be physically unable to run any computer program that hasn’t been signed with a crypto key stored in the hardware.

So what, you’re going to say, I was planning to use Windows 8 anyway.

Read that again.

Your machine will be physically unable to run any unsigned program.

That includes software you’re developing yourself.

Once Windows 8 comes along, you’d better hope Visual Studio Express signs the generated executables with a basic key that will at least allow you to make a game or whatever without having to pay Microsoft for the privilege. Oh wait, were you considering some other toolchain? Tough luck; you’re going to use what they give you (cough XCode cough) and be grateful for it. Or maybe you were planning to write a browser game, entirely in Javascript? You’d better hope your browser of choice will be approved for Windows 8. Which is hardly a given for the likes of Firefox.

Oh, and before you make any hopes? Rest assured that the one thing this freaky restriction will not achieve is the stated purpose of curbing malware. Bad guys don’t play by the rules, you know. The only people affected will be those trying to make a honest living.

If you care about your right to develop software, any software at all, consider signing the Free Software Foundation’s statement.

Secure Boot endangers software development by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.