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The wealth of big name choiceThe wealth of big name choicePosted May 1, 2012 13:39 UTC (Tue) by petrakis (subscriber, #39672)In reply to: The wealth of big name choice by pboddie Parent article: Two Years Fly By: Ubuntu Precise Pangolin Pads Into Production (Linux.com)
Even if you can't buy that OEM system preloaded in your geographic area, if you can still get it, even with Windows pre-installed, it's worth it. As part of the certification process includes a BIOS/ACPI hardening suite that ensures things like suspend/resume and hotkeys "just work". That's the unsung value of all this certification we're doing, training the OEMs that just because the Microsoft ACPI compiler tells them they're done, doesn't mean their firmware will work well with any other operating system.
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/
A by product of this work is something called "fwts" which is sort of an ACPI regression test suite. Run it on any machine to see how compliant you are to the spec, it's quite extensive.
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The wealth of big name choice Posted May 1, 2012 15:59 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I certainly value the work being done to certify hardware, and the Ubuntu certified hardware site was important when evaluating hardware recently, but the problem is more than just technical: I can certainly install Ubuntu (or whatever) myself, but I don't see why anyone should have to accept a Windows licensing transaction being made on their behalf, with money moving in the general direction of Microsoft regardless of who has supposedly "sponsored" that transaction. The whole business promotes a culture where some form of anticompetitive syndicate carves up the revenue and the purchaser just has to accept what they are offered.
But I agree that bringing component manufacturers up to speed with specifications and standards compliance is important in being able to reassure vendors that they don't need to use Windows as some kind of proof that the hardware works (to whatever degree), and that they might even unbundle Windows from their devices in future. Still, I'm surprised that the Ubuntu brand isn't being used to promote hardware that is more friendly to Free Software.
The wealth of big name choice Posted May 1, 2012 17:10 UTC (Tue) by petrakis (subscriber, #39672) [Link]
In response to your first point, this isn't really a new paradigm right? Whenever you have an incumbent, entrenched supplier, with economies of scale on their side it's usually impossible to take them head on (unless money is no object), so you do the next best thing, you out grow them in emerging markets, which is what we've done. That the OEMs have yet to explicitly decouple the cost of this supplier from our offering is merely a matter of timing and leverage. They are in business after all. That leverage is called "ARM", MS missed it, and Canonical/Linaro is all over it.
With regards to your second point, the Ubuntu brand does promote free software, it's based on Debian, we feed any HWE fixes we can back up upstream, however, we're are not the GNU Foundation; we're not all or nothing when it comes to free software, we make sensible compromises to
It's important to be able to compromise, this Thinkpad I type this response on is powered 100% by free software, though I could have
Absolutely not.
A lot of this market and the arguments that ensue get implicitly framed around the Wintel duopoly, times are changing, and that market is becoming less relevant thanks to ARM. Soon, your next desktop, laptop, tablet might be powered by ARM, composed 100% of free software, have no attachment SIGs like ACPI or the cost of a Windows license built in. Thanks to the great software management Ubuntu provides, the end user won't even know that their unit doesn't have x86 inside. That's the necessary leverage for OEMs to decouple the Window's tax from their offerings, the cost of missing this growth will exceed the cost of doing business as usual.
Even if they did that, the future ARM offerings will be so compelling that the users probably won't care anymore and just move forward.
The wealth of big name choice Posted May 1, 2012 18:07 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>That's the necessary leverage for OEMs to decouple the Window's tax from their offerings, the cost of missing this growth will exceed the cost of doing business as usual.
That's all great. But what users are going to do with your Ubuntu tablet? Will it play AngryBirds?
The wealth of big name choice Posted May 1, 2012 18:33 UTC (Tue) by petrakis (subscriber, #39672) [Link]
>That's the necessary leverage for OEMs to decouple the Window's tax from their offerings, the cost of missing this growth will exceed the cost of doing business as usual.
>>That's all great. But what users are going to do with your Ubuntu tablet? Will it play AngryBirds?
That's the nature of building markets and channels, if you've got a better strategy let's hear it. A few years ago no one though 3D graphics would be suitable for desktop use, now Unity is based on it. If you don't push the boundaries, there's no incentive to grow.
It's funny, a few years ago people scoffed at the idea of spending a dollar to buy an app for a smartphone. Now the iPhone app space is the site of the next internet gold rush.
The wealth of big name choice Posted May 1, 2012 18:31 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] In response to your first point, this isn't really a new paradigm right? Whenever you have an incumbent, entrenched supplier, with economies of scale on their side it's usually impossible to take them head on (unless money is no object), so you do the next best thing, you out grow them in emerging markets, which is what we've done. Well, I still have hopes that some regulatory action may actually force vendors to unbundle Windows and implement price transparency. To an extent, there is actually price transparency in various markets already, so it isn't a completely fanciful notion. Certainly, removing excuses about there not being viable alternatives ("we have to ship Windows because nothing else can take advantage of our amazing hardware") is also important, and as I wrote, making sure that Linux can use all the components is just one way of bringing the necessary pressure to bear on vendors. With regards to your second point, the Ubuntu brand does promote free software, it's based on Debian, we feed any HWE fixes we can back up upstream, however, we're are not the GNU Foundation; we're not all or nothing when it comes to free software, we make sensible compromises to grow the desktop market. I should have been clearer here. What I meant was that the Ubuntu brand isn't being used aggressively enough. It's one thing to try and persuade vendors to consider pre-installing Ubuntu, arguably with only modest success because this probably means the vendors not taking promotional incentives or instead having to suffer increased prices for Microsoft products, and then merely telling people that they can install Ubuntu after buying a product with Windows installed. It would be something else if they could actually buy an Ubuntu-branded laptop. A lot of this market and the arguments that ensue get implicitly framed around the Wintel duopoly, times are changing, and that market is becoming less relevant thanks to ARM. Soon, your next desktop, laptop, tablet might be powered by ARM, composed 100% of free software, have no attachment SIGs like ACPI or the cost of a Windows license built in. We can certainly hope for such big changes, but I can think of a few non-technical obstacles: Microsoft's patent shakedown of vendors not shipping Windows-branded products, performance shortcomings of ARM-based products, proprietary extensions to ARM-based products, and the Windows licensing racket being extended to cover these products anyway. Still, every different strategy helps. I got my last ARM-based desktop over twenty years ago and although it didn't ship with Free Software, it eventually got a degree of Free Software support.
The wealth of big name choice Posted May 1, 2012 22:26 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> It would be something else if they could actually buy an Ubuntu-branded laptop.
That's not a bad idea. Canonical could buy out a small OEM like System76 and advertise. This would be borrowing a lot of the Apple strategy. The difficult part would be the phone/tablet side. There arent any small OEMs to buy out, the best you could do is rebrand a Nexus phone but you wouldnt be able to get a profit reselling them. That might be the only way that Ubuntu on Android is successful though
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