ThinkPenguin uses only chipsets that have free software drivers available. On
the retail side I think it's more then possible to point to companies selling
to end users. The problem is there aren't any companies besides ThinkPenguin
selling only freedom friendly hardware.
As far as the chipset companies go Atheros does a good job with some although
not all chipsets. They do a good job with PCI/PCIe chipsets. They have / are
cooperating with USB N chipsets. I'm hoping to get them to do the same for
Bluetooth PCIe.
Intel does a good job with graphics although is hostile to a free BIOS.
AMD is hostile period. They do like the public relations benefits of
supporting "open source" though.
NVIDIA has been hostile. That might be changing or it might not be. AMD
pulled a PR move by releasing some code/specifications and now everybody
thinks they are great despite failing miserably to offer something that is
freedom friendly.
HP is pretty much the only printer manufacturer which offers good
documentation and support to the development of a free software driver for a
respectable portion of their printers. Canon, Lexmark, Samsung and others
which have provided drivers in some cases for some markets have failed to
deliver. They were non-free and a real pain for the users who didn't know or
didn't care about freedom.
The webcam market is pretty straight forward. My understanding is there isn't
anything complicated about writing such drivers and pretty much everything
has a driver. That isn't to say every device works though. The credit to this
goes completely to the free software community which developed said drivers I
believe. I don't know if any webcam chipset companies provided support.
dial-up modems are interesting. There is a standard driver that supports some
USB modems. Any card that works with this driver is probably the one you
want. I don't know who made that driver possible, how it came about, or if
one of these chipset companies helped.
I'm not sure about USB ethernet chipsets. I believe that all the 10/100's are
all free and the code probably written by the chipset companies. The
10/100/1000 adapters are not all freedom friendly. Nor are all the
PCI/PCIe/laptop 10/100/1000 chipsets.
That is almost all of the info I have on this subject. At least of the
hardware we sell. There are some others we have investigated a little like TV
cards and HD decoders.
