Recommended Hardware
From GLUG-Wiki
Contents |
Why supporting free software friendly vendors matters
Often, a selection of hardware purely on cost will lead one to buy a system that either does not run free software, or in many cases only works if you install a binary-only device driver supplied by the manufacturer. This is dangerous in terms of security and operability, and also conceptually and philosophically dangerous.
Security and operability
When you don't have the source code of software that runs on your system, you just have to trust that they are not in any way malicious, and also that they have not been compromised by malicious individuals. If they or a hacker placed a back-door in the software, you're in trouble.
You also have to trust in the quality of their code. There is no such thing as bug-free code (beyond trivial cases). If the code is given as a BLOB (Binary Linked OBject), how do you debug it?
Conceptual and philosophical concerns
Many hardware vendors do not supply full specifications to their systems that allow one to program your own software. This means that when support for the hardware is gone, you really are stuck. Free Software programmers often make heroic efforts in these situations, reverse-engineering the features of graphics cards, WinModems and motherboard sound chipsets, and the results are often quite good, but imagine what that effort could do if applied to more generally useful projects!
So you've gotten a great quote on the latest graphics card from NVIATI, and you check whether it's supported under FreeBSD or Linux. Well, not in the free distribution and development is going slowly because of the vendor not playing nicely with the free software crowd, but no worry: there's a binary driver that'll run it. You're safely behind an industrial-strength firewall, and it's free, so what's the worry? Well, remember, by buying that card, you're paying someone to make hardware without releasing specs or source code. Surely your money would be better spent elsewhere, even if it costs a bit more?
Resources to research for when choosing hardware to purchase:
- - FSF hardware page - Submissions of working hardware accepted too
- Linux Journal
