Well, h-node wasn't really made for this purpose. I'm not saying it's a bad
idea or that it wouldn't be welcomed. Part of the problem I feel is that
companies also purport to be freedom respecting and aren't. At what point do
you classify a company as being freedom respecting? Is it when they only ship
chipsets which have free software drivers? Or do you do it when only use
chipsets which are supported in some way by the chipset vendor? For example
HP offers that although NVIDIA does not.
NVIDIA's stance on free software is hostile. They've taken an approach that
hinders development of a free driver. However there is a free software driver
for older chipsets that was reverse engineered. Do we say that is OK to sell
such hardware or not? libre.thinkpenguin.com offers one card with an NVIDIA
graphics chipset that is well supported by the free nouveau driver. I'm not a
fan of NVIDIA over this. However we are offering one card. We won't do that
for laptops and desktops for various reasons. For one the newer graphics
chipsets are not sufficiently (and at all) supported by any free driver.
FSF has a program which we will be participating in. It's not so much a list
as an endorsement.
I'm kind of of the perspective that we need to support whomever is doing the
best job for any particular category of hardwre. If that is Atheros then we
should support Atheros. If that is HP we should support HP. If that is Intel
we should support Intel.
Now these companies don't provide freedom friendly chipsets everywhere. They
only tend to do it where someone has convinced hire ups that it would be
beneficial to the company for them to do so.
There are problems with this though. For instance Intel graphics chips are
tied to Intel CPUs. Intel has been uncooperative with the coreboot (a free
BIOS project) though. Do we classify them as hostile or not? AMD has also
been hostile though. AMD does work with the coreboot project although has not
resolved the issue of shipping a partially free driver that is dependent on a
non-free component.
Then if you get to the retail side of things there really isn't anybody out
there selling freedom friendly hardware except us. Sure- there are companies
claiming to do so. But what they actually ship is hardware dependent on
non-free drivers/firmware. Some of it you won't even be able to make work
with a free distribution because of digital restrictions in these systems.
The reaction of the people running them is not good. They give poor excuses
as to why they can't ship freedom friendly hardware rather than fixing the
problem (which is not technically an issue for them).
