Hardware Advocacy or Making it easy to do the right thing.

[John McCabe-Dansted]

Most of the hardware advocacy I have seen is of the Big Stick
approach. However the stick the open source community wields is rather
small. Perhaps a carrot would be more effective.

If I go to apple.com, I can click on "Store" and instantly get the
option to buy a variety hardware known to work on the Mac. On the
other hand, If I dig around on the Ubuntu website for a while I find
that Ubuntu has exactly one hardware partner: Sun, who aren't really
offering to sell any hardware I want.

Would it be feasible for Ubuntu/Canonical to open a web-store that
specialises in hardware that "Just works" on Linux/Ubuntu, and sells
devices with open-source drivers where-ever possible?

While Linux isn't big enough to greatly influence the entire market,
Ubuntu might have enough buying power to influence some of the more
minor hardware manufacturers, particularly if working together with
the other Linux distros. I don't really need open-source drivers to
all hardware, so long as there is one piece of easily available
hardware in each class that does what I need and has open-source
drivers. In any case, the threat "if you don't provide an open source
driver, I'll buy my card from Ubuntu.com" has much more financial
power than threatening to pay full price but only use the text mode of
your video card or whatever.

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia