> it is really fearmongering when the systemd people literally founded a company to develop attestation for linux?
Considering it changes nothing on what they actually work on on systemd I would give this a yes. Every time I hear "they will do this or that" it just never really happened. So far it feels more like "the boy who cried wolf" than "slippery slope" to me. But maybe I am missing something?
A lot of the devs have always here and there added features for secure/measured boot and image based OSes and things that make them more usable to daily drive (hermetic /usr/, UKIs, sysext, portable services, mkosi, DDIs, ...). A lot of the things make image based systems more modifiable/user accessible without compromising on the general security aspect.
If they really wanted to lock in Linux users to a single blessed image from them they would have had a better chance when Lennart was working at Microsoft (which generally is the only preinstalled CA) instead of starting a "competing" company (they are targeting a different niche from what I understand).
This, and locking down everyone to a single blessed Linux distro would be... Rather difficult given how widespread Linux is and just how many distros exist. It is one thing for each distro to decide "Hey, let's use systemd". Gnome requires it but that's Gnome; there is nothing stopping you from using XFCE, or I3, or KDE, or... It is a totally different thing to make every Linux distro stop working (and have said distro go along with that) because that distro isn't the "blessed" one. Microsoft can pull this off because they're Microsoft and they have total control over one of the most dominant operating systems. Apple can pull this off because they're Apple and control everything from the hardware upwards. Linux is neither of these. I would go so far as to argue that the BSDs have a better chance of pulling off something like this than Lennart does. RedHat may have a lot of influence in the Linux world, but it certainly doesn't have some secret god mode switch it can flip and universally make every distro conform to it's wants and desires.
Considering it changes nothing on what they actually work on on systemd I would give this a yes. Every time I hear "they will do this or that" it just never really happened. So far it feels more like "the boy who cried wolf" than "slippery slope" to me. But maybe I am missing something?
A lot of the devs have always here and there added features for secure/measured boot and image based OSes and things that make them more usable to daily drive (hermetic /usr/, UKIs, sysext, portable services, mkosi, DDIs, ...). A lot of the things make image based systems more modifiable/user accessible without compromising on the general security aspect.
If they really wanted to lock in Linux users to a single blessed image from them they would have had a better chance when Lennart was working at Microsoft (which generally is the only preinstalled CA) instead of starting a "competing" company (they are targeting a different niche from what I understand).