Website Which Rates HW Vendors On Their Openness? 2
A singular voice out of the multitude of Anonymous Cowards can be heard asking the following: "There are a many stories of hardware vendors preventing people using their hardware because they refuse to release specs. And a quite a few of companies who promise to release specs, but reneg on their word (ie: Alcatel USB SpeedTouch). In light of this I was wondering if there's a website that gives vendors ratings based on how open source friendly they are? A focus of good and bad publicity that might just make them think harder about being open source friendly." This would be a good resource for those of us who are looking to purchase Open Source friendly hardware (be it for Linux, BSD or a future free OS). How do you all feel about such a site and if one does not exist, who would be interested in starting one?
Sort of a 1/2-ass answer (better than nothing) (Score:3)
Well, there is linhardware.com [linhardware.com] which is a pretty good source of information regardling what works (and how well, links to driver info, etc. sort of like HCL++). Linux only, which is too bad. Maybe some enterprising person will generalize this out to (random name) openhw.org for all the major alterna-OSes (linux, *BSD, BeOS). I can see this as being pretty easy to do using Slashcode (OSes = categories) or similar. There would probably have to be some way to sub-cateogry as well (e.g. BSD:WAN Interfaces or BeOS:3d Accelerators), to allow a dual functionality from the site combining the current news format of /. and the heirarchical format of LhD.
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Cool idea.. (Score:1)
The trouble is that the information is diverse and scattered -- how do you judge if a company is good or not? You could probably figure out a good rating system eg:
lowest - explicitly (stated) closed, and no drivers for alt OS
to highest - explicitly (stated) open, perhaps with patent, perhaps not, with open soucre developed w/ company time/money drivers.
Seems like it would be kinda worthless if it was all hearsay and the best thing would be to document each "point" eg: they *say* they are open source, here is a copy of the company mission statement. or: they produce freeBSD drivers, here is the link to the ftp site.
It would be great to be in a position to make not only compatability choices (x or y works well with Linux -- there are plenty of sites that will tell you that info) but choices based on the "moral/political" aspect of the company.
If it is designed as a site where users can add or remove points from a company by submitting documentation or links or something.. should work out pretty well.