Re: [Trisquel-users] ThinkPenguin laptop photos

[chris]

You're absolutely correct. Not only does it help Trisquel it helps everybody  
from a hardware perspective too. There are some things you can't buy today  
that you'll be able to get tomorrow. At least for the time being almost 100%  
of the profits are being reinvested into free software (donations to  
Trisquel, FSF, and other projects) and/or the companies operations. The  
reinvestment is leading to improvements in the availability of free software  
friendly hard ware. This is a slow process for some items like Bluetooth in  
laptops or a newer USB N wireless adapter. It is happening though. Just to  
give you an idea how difficult it is. In order to manufacture a USB N  
wireless adapter not only do we need Atheros to release the source code for  
the chipset we also have to make a $30,000 USD investment in there  
manufacture of the cards. The retail sale of those adapters is significantly  
higher. That's over $100,000 USD at retail. We don't have that kind of demand  
yet. However I believe there to be more than sufficient demand. In fact there  
is probably a market for about 27 million USD a year for just this one  
adapter. What we are missing right now is marketing.

If we succeed in setting up the channels, marketing, and so on there will not  
be a GNU/Linux “problem” any more. Free software development (and desktop  
applications in particular that I'm referring) will flourish.