OpenBSD Journal

Vendor Watch: It's Time to Get Organized Against Vendors

Contributed by Sam Chill on from the hier-nicht-kaufen dept.

As a response to many people asking for a list of "good" and "bad" hardware vendors I recently purchased vendorwatch.org and setup a wiki. The goal of the site is to provide an organized place to learn about the openness of various vendors, to provide contact information, and a common ground to discuss approaches to getting vendors to open up.

I personally do not know too much about individual vendors, but I have been doing research to dig up contacts and information for each company. The wikipedia has been a good resource for finding basic information on vendors and the openbsd mailing list archives have given me some contact info.

I currently need people to help me add vendor information to the wiki. I would also like to get people's ideas and comments on the project. Hopefully this wiki will grow and will help in getting vendors to release documentation on their hardware.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (212.85.74.34) on

    Good initiative!

    Now good and bad vendors get the spotlight turned on them :)
    It'll definitely be somewhere I'll check before buying hardware (saves me the trouble of googling).

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.239.54) on

      > Good initiative!
      >
      > Now good and bad vendors get the spotlight turned on them :)
      > It'll definitely be somewhere I'll check before buying hardware (saves me the trouble of googling).


      That`s correct. The idea itself is pretty neat!
      Maybe bad vendors should get a red-background and good vendors a green one? :-)

  2. By Anonymous Coward (67.170.176.126) on

    Great job Sam ! Thank you for taking the initiative. Let's start by defining some metrics to rate the "openness" of a vendor (i.e. 5 star rating system) _then_ let's find some examples in the market of good product/vendor. Do we have a company that has been good to opensource ? let's put it up there for everybody to see. Can we come up with the three best examples of open hw ? The three worst ones ? Let's put together a press release or a story and let's start make the rounds of opensource news sites, some blogs and what else ... Maybe we could create small and cheap awards (a shiny silvery metal blowfish for the good vendors, a dark, wooden one for the bad guys) to deliver, with pictures taken, to their marketing dept. Anything that can generate some buzz ...

    AC

    Comments
    1. By Sam Chill (68.53.205.186) samchill (at) gmail (dot) com on http://www.vendorwatch.org

      These are the kind of ideas I wanted to hear! I was wanting to do some sort of rating system, but I'm not quite sure how that woudl work. Rewarding the "good" ones and punishing the "bad" ones might be the only way to get them to do anything.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (71.162.132.178) on

        I think instead of a plain rating system like one through five, you should have a list of open facets of a vendor's products. E.g.:

        * Documentation for drivers
        * Driver source code under Free license (the next question is, which one?)
        * Permit redistribution of firmware
        * Firmware source code released under Free license
        * Contribution of code/money/hw to free projects

        Etc. You could do these as individual stars or whatever, but they're not all equal in importance--firmware source code is relatively useless, and contribution of money or some of your products won't mean anything if you don't have driver documentation to begin with.

        Comments
        1. By Darrin Chandler (216.9.200.67) dwchandler@stilyagin.com on http://www.stilyagin.com/

          > I think instead of a plain rating system like one through five, you should have a list of open facets of a vendor's products. E.g.:
          >
          > * Documentation for drivers
          > * Driver source code under Free license (the next question is, which one?)
          > * Permit redistribution of firmware
          > * Firmware source code released under Free license
          > * Contribution of code/money/hw to free projects
          >
          > Etc. You could do these as individual stars or whatever, but they're not all equal in importance--firmware source code is relatively useless, and contribution of money or some of your products won't mean anything if you don't have driver documentation to begin with.

          Good idea. Don't forget documentation of the hardware itself! Drivers can be written, given motivation, as long as the hardware docs are available. Vendor supplied source drivers aren't always a good thing (ATI, anyone?)...

        2. By Anonymous Coward (70.74.75.200) on

          > I think instead of a plain rating system like one through five, you should have a list of open facets of a vendor's products. E.g.:

          I'd like to add to your good suggestions, which is to include a list where users/customers get a chance to tell the vendors they've gained or going to gain or lost a sale depending on their openness. The list could be a poll with short user comments to justify their choice. Basically, the site should have both information for vendors and for the Free Source community to evaluate and to take action. Inviting the vendors to the discussion is better than isolating them.

          Another suggestion is to keep track of progress, such as x number of people have written to a vendor and the vendor's response. However, I don't know if the site will want to track users this way.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (84.166.75.82) on

      > Maybe we could create small and cheap awards (a shiny silvery metal blowfish for the good
      > vendors, a dark, wooden one for the bad guys) to deliver, with pictures taken, to their
      > marketing dept. Anything that can generate some buzz ...

      On LinuxTag '06 the idea of a 'Blob-Award' came up ...

      Comments
      1. By wim (194.78.167.231) wim@kd85.com on https://kd85.com/notforsale.html

        > > Maybe we could create small and cheap awards (a shiny silvery metal blowfish for the good
        > > vendors, a dark, wooden one for the bad guys) to deliver, with pictures taken, to their
        > > marketing dept. Anything that can generate some buzz ...
        >
        > On LinuxTag '06 the idea of a 'Blob-Award' came up ...

        Wel, I would like to nominate Mark Shuttleworth, the sugar daddy behind Ubuntu, who during his keynote speach at LinuxTag answered a question about this and stated that they embrace as many binary contributions from vendors without questions to offer their users the "best experience". He wanted to sign an exclusive deal with Broadcom.

        And the amazing thing was there was no uproar or negative reaction from the crowd (mainly consisting of Linux users of course....)

        Doomed...

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (84.166.123.168) on

          >> On LinuxTag '06 the idea of a 'Blob-Award' came up ...

          > Wel, I would like to nominate Mark Shuttleworth, the sugar daddy behind Ubuntu,
          > who during his keynote speach at LinuxTag answered a question about this and
          > stated that they embrace as many binary contributions from vendors without
          > questions to offer their users the "best experience". He wanted to sign an exclusive
          > deal with Broadcom.

          Maybe it would be good to have two different Blob-Awards. One for Vendors and one
          for those people who try to poison free software from within (project leaders,
          developers and other 'subjects' in the community which are proud of their blob-love) ...

        2. By Shane J Pearson (202.45.125.5) on

          > Wel, I would like to nominate Mark Shuttleworth, the sugar daddy behind Ubuntu, who during his keynote speach at LinuxTag answered a question about this and stated that they embrace as many binary contributions from vendors without questions to offer their users the "best experience". He wanted to sign an exclusive deal with Broadcom.

          Ahh Ubuntu. Where your root password is plaintext in a World readable installation log file and nobody in the whole community noticed until the next version.

          Baaa aa aaa aa....

          It seems that for every greedy person with money, there is a well meaning idiot with money.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.208.173) on

            > .. [snip] Ubuntu ... [snip] ..

            What really bugs me is that Ubuntu has rapidly become a leading Linux distribution (practically coming out of nowhere). Virtually all the Linux people I've encountered as of late have switched to it. You just don't seem to score any points for sticking to ideals as far as most users are concerned. I guess this way a predictable consequence of free software spreading from its dedicated early champions and into corporations and the larger public.

    3. By Fábio Olivé Leite (15.227.249.72) on

      > Maybe we could create small and cheap awards (a shiny silvery metal
      > blowfish for the good vendors, a dark, wooden one for the bad guys)
      > to deliver, with pictures taken, to their marketing dept.

      It would be great to have the blob awards indeed! The positive ones would
      be the silver medals, but the negative ones would have to be something
      more blob-like, as in dried up tar or some other substance like it that
      resembles spilled oil in the otherwise cristal clear ocean of free software. :)

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (68.167.146.78) on

        > > Maybe we could create small and cheap awards (a shiny silvery metal
        > > blowfish for the good vendors, a dark, wooden one for the bad guys)
        > > to deliver, with pictures taken, to their marketing dept.
        >
        > It would be great to have the blob awards indeed! The positive ones would
        > be the silver medals, but the negative ones would have to be something
        > more blob-like, as in dried up tar or some other substance like it that
        > resembles spilled oil in the otherwise cristal clear ocean of free software. :)
        >

        I wonder if the CEOs of Broadcom, TI, and Intel would do like Halle Berry did with "Catwoman" and show up to accept it in person! :-D

  3. By voline (24.22.28.189) on

    I stopped to read the comments on this story. And I'm just amazed by the immature, asinine level of the discussion here. Typical seems to be "X sucks shit. End of story". Wow, with a presentation of evidence and reasoning like that, how could anyone not respect your opinion?

    What is the average age of the posters here? 14? Worse than Slashdot (which takes some doing). I'm off. I won't be wasting any of my time reading the discussion here again.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (68.104.1.58) on

      you will be sorely missed, or something.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (66.11.66.41) on

      X sucks shit. End of story.

      Sorry, I couldn't help myself, it was too stupid to pass up.

    3. By Fábio Olivé Leite (15.227.249.72) on

      Perhaps you wanted to reply to the gcc-bashing in the previous story?

    4. By Shane J Pearson (202.45.125.5) on

      > What is the average age of the posters here? 14? Worse than Slashdot (which takes some doing). I'm off. I won't be wasting any of my time reading the discussion here again.

      You felt compelled to say something, so I can only assume that you felt this initiative was worth spending some time reading about. So why don't you contribute something worthwhile instead of just complaining? You can make the difference from the norm which you dislike.

      Back on topic, I don't think a star based system would be great. I usually ignore such ratings, simply because they can only really be a superficial indicator to issues which usually deserve a far greater amount of attention from everybody who cares. I see it more black and white and thus not requiring multiple levels of rating, since a vendor either cares or does not. If a vendor cares, they provide documentation and freely distributable firmware images, etc.

      I like the red/green distinction, because it can quickly draw attention to where it is needed and help to shame. 0-5 stars always seems to me to be levels of goodness for anything above zero.

      I would like to see info and links under each of the "reds" to news items and mailing list posts which spotlight that companies poor stance on customer support and the impact of it. While the "greens" should get not only info and links highlighting those companies good customer support, but also links to where to buy and perhaps links to appropriate Google searches for their products.

      The front page should probably have some well thought out description of why these unsupportive companies are bad for all Open Source Software and the freedom of the people who supposedly use OSS for the freedom. Since Linux vendors and FreeBSD seem to be terribly quick to accept the terms of companies, when the companies should really be accepting the terms of we the customers. The companies are NOTHING without their customers, so we should dictate the terms to them.

      From a recent interview with Theo, I got the gist that we the consumers have become "the product". Where bigger companies are selling us to the smaller OEM's. We are a commodity or stock which gets used for buying and selling power. Surely this could only happen through the public becoming complacent with choice and levels of support.

      The companies will continue to do the wrong thing as long as it is profitable for them. Once they see their profits going down (the only thing which matters to them), then they will change. A little bad press or a drop in profits of 0.1% is not going to do it. We'd have to get a large number of OSS users behind this initiative to have a good chance of making a change. But I think the fundamental change which is required for the greater good (including shifting companies to an open stance), is for the consuming public to realise that they have the ultimate power in their wallets.

      Funny how Linux, with all the press it gets about being open and free as in beer and freedom, is getting a little bit of corporate evil injected into the inside of it and the freedom loving users don't seem to be noticing it. NDA's and BLOBS acceptable for GNU/Linux? That's the "choice of a GNU generation"?

      Thank goodness for OpenBSD.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (203.113.233.17) on

    I don't see how we can really except to be required to load vendor supplied blobs into the OpenBSD kernel. I mean come on. Yeah right.

  5. By Zeleni Obad (217.23.205.191) zeleni_obad@yahoo.co.uk on

    "...We shall fight in the kernel,
    we shall fight in the userland.
    We shall fight over the infrastructure,
    we shall fight for the content.
    We shall fight in the code.
    We shall never surrender..."

    :)

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