Ubuntu is not free.

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 23:08 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 12/07/06, Andrew Zajac <arzajac at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And vendors will make that choice pretty easily if that's what their
> > clients want.
> 
> The thing is, to be vocal. Every time I pass a computer store I pop in
> and ask if this or that will work on my system. Wireless keyboards,
> sound cards, whatever. The idea is to show that we exist, even when
> you don't intend to buy. That way, when you actually need something,
> they'll have it.

And never ever forget that you are the customer in this deal, as opposed
to some arb object to be fleeced.

Customers have rights, such as the right to use a piece of hardware that
they own in any way they see fit, the right to know how it works so that
they can use it in the way they see fit, etc, etc. Decent companies know
that their customers are important and do listen to them.

Amongst ourselves on this list we can talk FLOSS philosophy all day and
get agreement. But when we talk to vendors, we must talk as *paying*
customers and there's a excellent chance we will be heard. The gist of
the talk must be that you use/want to use their hardware, and they need
to release the specs. If they can't do this right away because of an NDA
with some other party, then our response is "OK fine, so get the third
party to cancel the NDA. Let me remind you that I am a paying customer."

Let's look at numbers, and assume that 1 000 000 million world-wide use
Linux. A huge chunk of them use Ubuntu, and say 80% of those have ATI or
nVidia cards. If every one of them sent a written snail mail to ATI or
nVidia tomorrow, it would take a truck to deliver the 60,000 resulting
letters to each. Think for a moment and imagine the enormous effect that
will have - I can assure you it will catch attention at board level.

alan