Fedora Linux Surrenders To Microsoft's Certificate

Fedora 18 is all set to appear in November this year and the developers from the project are not leaving any stone unturned in making this first project of its kind a hit on the computers using UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). To facilitate the same, the project will obtain a digital key from Microsoft. The organisation will pay US$99 to Microsoft for signing the binary release of the Fedora distribution.

Matthew Garrett in a blog post wrote, “This isn't an attractive solution, but it is a workable one. We came to the conclusion that every other approach was unworkable.”
Corresponding to the ever rising demand of UEFI among hardware developers, Fedora project underwent a number of alternatives, which were more of a failure. The project could have gone further without the hassles of a digital signature only to land its users in the firmware settings. Garrett said, “The cause of free software isn't furthered by making it difficult or impossible for unskilled users to run Linux, and while this approach does have its downsides, it does also avoid us ending up where we were in the 90s.”
“Users will retain the freedom to run modified software and we wouldn't have accepted any solution that made that impossible,” he added.
Fedora could have also tried producing its own key, which could require the project to buy-in from each hardware manufacturer and that could have been difficult and incompatible to achieve. Also, it would have also left out smaller Linux distributions like Slackware, which would have lacked the resources for their keys.
On the other hand, producing keys for all Linux distributions could have taken a lot of time and money, which no Linux distributors would have got into. Microsoft will be charging less than $200 a year for Fedora's twice-a-year release schedule.