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

[Joel Bryan Juliano]

On 2/25/07, John McCabe-Dansted <gmatht at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

There is System76 <http://system76.com> a very good company in terms of
pricing and hardware, providing very affordable prices, amazing
specifications, and hardware that is fully compatible with Ubuntu.
The cons are it does not ship abroad, only available in US and Canada.

Also there is http://www.thelinuxstore.ca<http://www.thelinuxstore.ca/index.php?currency=USD&main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=1268>that
also ship hardware preinstalled with Ubuntu. There is a very few
choices of hardware, but they ship internationally.

In my opinion, I wish Canonical to just stick with the software and support
business because it's where they really good at. IMHO, hardware does what
software wants and software is the sociology of hardware.

Regards,
Joel



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