Re: Development Question

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 5:23 PM, CS DBA <cs_dba consistentstate com> wrote:
> Hi All;
>
> It seems to me that the "marriage" that Microsoft & Apple enjoy per hardware
> designed for their software gives them a huge advantage. I see that the
> Linux community is quite good at coming up with drivers, software, etc for
> hardware after the fact.
>
> I wonder, what could be accomplished if a Linux based distro had the same
> advantage?  I'm in the early stages of researching just such a company.

Quite a bit.  Vertical integration is all the rage now.  So, it would
be great to be able to have an accord between GNOME and a hardware
vendor.

> We'll be setting up some infrastructure around community involvement and
> feedback, however I'd be interested in any initial feedback you all have.

You have a challenging road ahead of you.  Like we are working on a
product, likewise you will need to come up with a laptop or desktop
that has the kind of appeal that Apple has.  Of course that means
having some designers and engineers that know how to create a
compelling laptop shell with the right mix of features.

> I'm thinking that the OS would remain fully open source (GPL) and we'd
> license the hardware specs in the same way.

Can you go into some detail on licensing the hardware spec?

> Then we could release laptops & desktops that truly have an advantage. The
> company would couple a solid Linux distro with it's own tweaks (polish &
> branding & such) coupled with our own hardware.

I suggest you contact the folks at Zareason who have been also been
making laptops and desktops specifically for GNU/Linux.  It would be
really great to see a joint venture, maybe one person comes up with a
design and the other creates them?  I'm not sure having competing
companies at this venture is a good idea given how small the market
is.

> I suspect that instead of waiting for the current HW vendors to release new
> hardware and then quickly figure out how to interface with it we can put
> effort into polish and functionality and quickly become the trend setters
> for MS and Apple to follow.

You're not really out of the woods.  You'll always be one generation
behind as support for new hardware will initially be for Windows (or I
suppose Apple, but they dont' have that problem) and it's always been
hard to get Linux support for non-main line hardware.  Unless of
course you can leverage a large number of customers to be able to use
the market to force them to make drivers.

Anyways, good luck!  For further reading, please consider reading here:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS

sri

> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks in advance
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