On 05/04/16 13:42, Paul Boddie wrote:
On Tuesday 5. April 2016 10.20.49 Daniel Pocock wrote:
On 04/04/16 18:42, Tobias Platen wrote:
Half a year ago I baught a libreboot machine from Minifree, which is now my main computer. I own several ARM based computers, with processors from Texas Instruments and Allwinner, which I use for various other tasks. I'm also interested in PowerPC, as a replacement for Intel. Ive heard about a PowerPC notebook[1] as a community effort.
This type of practical feedback and action is really underestimated
If every serious free software developer and user goes out and buys at least one piece of genuinely free hardware and tries to use it for some aspect of what we do then it will make us much more conscious of the fact that these platforms need to be supported seriously, even if we aren't explicitly things developing for them.
Agreed. I'm fed up of hearing about people who "must" have a MacBook (or whatever they're called) because of their supposed reliability or friendliness to Free Software, or because those people think it runs a "good enough version of Unix", as they then go and install all the GNU tools, anyway, after eventually discovering what everyone who had to use proprietary Unix a decade or two ago already knew.
The question is, can we make a shortlist of devices that people should consider buying? Such a shortlist would probably consider:
price and value for money
suitability for specific tasks (e.g. compiling, making
presentations, watching movies, office work)
warranty and servicing issues, e.g. for laptops
- can the battery be replaced,
- how easy is it to get it fixed or replaced at short notice if it fails while traveling to a conference
which distributions are supporting the device seriously and how many
other developers already have something similar, does it have critical mass
Collating these details for various products in each category (e.g. laptop, workstation, home server, embedded development board) will make it much easier for people to overcome whatever inertia keeps them from acquiring free hardware.
This kind of thing is a lot of work. We tried to collect a list of hardware vendors on the wiki:
http://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/Hardware Vendors
(Everything on the wiki has been moved around, so links may need to be followed via error pages.)
And there wasn't an attempt to catalogue the details, either. Really, it was enough work just tracking whether the companies offering stuff were still doing so or were even still trading at all.
Thanks for that feedback. It doesn't need to be a list of every possible option. Showing at least one or two suitable options and the criteria used to evaluate them gives people confidence to buy them.
Going beyond that, finding a way to gift such devices to free software developers could create even more momentum around support for free hardware.
I would rather Free Software developers came to their senses and made the right purchasing decisions than have them getting presents that they probably don't want and which end up lying around unused (or sold on, if various device developer programmes are any indication).
That is a generalization
If you give 1,000 laptops with genuinely free hardware to developers, I suspect some of those will appear on eBay but definitely not all of them. Some would be put to good use: if just 20% of the recipients did something serious with the device, it may compensate for the cost of the laptops "wasted" on the other 80% of developers.
By way of analogy, I've heard that the infantry has to shoot 8,000 bullets for every 1 enemy they kill.
Regards,
Daniel