“Microsoft will be offering signing services through their sysdev portal,” wrote Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett late last month. “It ensures compatibility with as wide a range of hardware as possible and it avoids Fedora having any special privileges over other Linux distributions. … So, in all probability … our first stage bootloader will be signed with a Microsoft key.” How innocent words can seem when taken apart from their meaning; put in context, the result was nothing short of a bomb going off in the Linux blogosphere’s main downtown.