Hi, this is a very interesting topic.. H-node is born with the aim of collecting hardware and many steps have been carried out in order to make its information useful for the free software community. Many other steps have to be done.
We should distinguish between sellers and vendors. At h-node.org we are listing vendors, not sellers. So for example AMD is a vendor, ThinkPenguin.com is a seller So there are two things that could be done: 1 - find a way to rate the vendors, as suggested by lembas inside the h-node.org issue page 2 - indicate where the devices can be bought (link to the sellers) Point 1 is very critical: we could both use a statistical approach by counting the number of working device (that we have at h-node with the same vendor) as a percentage of the total number of inserted devices and/or use some arbitrary parameters chosen by the project (do that vendor provide assistance to free software users? , do that vendor provide free drivers?, do that vendor avoid to use restricted boot?, and so on). We should be able to produce some kind of h-node index for each vendor. But as you can see it could be very arbitrary. I think that the easiest way would be to manually rate the vendor. For example, Apple should be marked as hostile even if, for example, some of their devices could work with free software. Point 2 is easier to solve: we could create a page that lists all the sellers that we think are good choices to buy a computer that works with free software (ThinkPenguin.com could be a good choice). But the sellers should be certified in some way. I think that the sellers should be certified by FSF (also because h-node is now a FSF activity). I don't know if it could be feasible. In principle I agree with the fact that who sells computers is the person who knows best these problems, but even if some sellers (such as thinkpenguin) seems to be very good choices, most of the sellers aren't reliable. So I think we should let the users to specify all the information as best as they can, even if in some cases (for some devices) the result is still a bit confusing (i.e., it is still not so simple to choose a device on h-node and then go to a shop and buy that device). But we can start thinking a way to choose, among the collected information at h-node, a way to select and suggest those devices that we know are working and we know that can be easily found (without the risk to confuse it with a similar device with a different chipset). This is a feature that have been discussed some time ago, a way to suggest a device, where the user can give a rank (positive or negative)
