On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 at 03:14 GMT, alex penned:
What do you think of everyone on this list and other Linux lists sending a form letter to all computer vendors asking them if they have systemless computers or components that will work with Linux? Do you think that would give them some incentive to become interested in providing such computers and advertise them as such? As it is now, what incentive do they have ?
I'm not sure how many requests they have to get before they have an effect. People are already asking now, aren't they? But maybe the sales person on the other end doesn't report this request to his/her boss ...
Whenever I call and ask I always make sure to have the salesman ask his supervisor. Failing that, I ask to personally speak to the supervisor.
Maybe having the right address / point of contact is the key.This is probably major point that is currently being overlooked.
Such a letter could be drafted and posted on lists along with as many major vendor addresses such as Tiger Direct . It could be designed so all one would have to do is copy it and the TO addresses and send it..
In my opinion, a form letter will not have as much impact as a number of individual letters. On the other hand, I don't know how much more of an impact a form letter has than no letter at all.
If the received 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 letters (boilerplate or not) saying "I want to buy your products, but I won't until you offer Linux support/OS-less machines/whatever," they will get their butts in gear.
Take a cheap desktop system, US$ 1000, times even only 10,000 potential customers. If there is a company out there willing to reject out of hand US$ 10,000,000 in potential sales, their shareholders need to know about some major high-level mismanagement.
My thought is the letter should not be system specific but use the word Linux in a generic sense..
Well, this poses problems, doesn't it? I agree with you in theory, but they want concrete facts, because they can probably be sued if they say "certified to work with linux" and then it turns out that some asshat is running redhat 6.2 and the driver support isn't present. So they want to be able to say "certified to work with X version of Y operating system." Problem is, I'd be pretty surprised if most new systems will work with, say, woody, right off the bat.
Ideally, they would say "certified to work with linux, and here, the linux drivers for all the hardware are on the CD we shipped with your system." Even that probably falls prey to issues of gcc versioning and whatnot, though ...
If the drivers are GPL (as most are), then a simple statement like support for this hardware is available in the Linux kernel version 2.4.21 and higher (or whatever), since GPL drivers tend to got included in the kernel. They can even give some suggestions, like: "The Linux kernel version 2.4.21 is available as part of Red Hat 9, Mandrake 9.2 and SUSE 9.1," or something like that (I'm pulling version numbers out of the air).
-Roberto
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