[ltp] Re: Lenovo to shun Linux

[Andrew Barr]

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On Sunday 04 June 2006 21:41, Kris Steenhaut wrote:
> Why should we do that? We (this list) isn't a list of Lenovo share
> holders, ist it?

There certainly could be some Lenovo shareholders, or at least IBM 
shareholders on this list. I don't know if Lenovo is a publically held 
company, but if it is and there are any Lenovo employees on this list surely 
they have some. I know there are IBM employees on this list, perhaps they 
have some as part of their 401(k) (or pension or whatever) plans.

> And why should we bother further on about Lenovo whereas Dell and HP
> maintain some degree of Linux support????

Yes, but there's a big difference between what companies like Dell and HP say 
when they say they "support Linux" and what we (individual laptop end-users) 
mean when we say they (usually don't) "support Linux". Reality is most of the 
Linux support of a notebook is determined by the component vendors, not the 
OEM. There might be a platform-specific hardware interface for some things, 
like screen brightness or battery control, but those are rapidly disappearing 
in favor of ACPI and other standardized interfaces. When a vendor says 
they "support Linux," they usually mean that they have support contracts 
available to enterprise customers for a selected list of very specific 
configurations, usually on servers but also sometimes for workstations and 
laptops. Many times they do back this up with actual code contributed to 
kernel.org or hosted on sf.net or whatever, but it's usually not of 
the "make-or-break Linux on laptop model X" variety. The only patches I've 
seen in kernel changelogs with a dell.com associated e-mail address, for 
example, have been system management interface support for their servers. As 
far as we're concerned, Dell is just as bad as Lenovo claims they're going to 
be when it comes to supporting Microsoft and shunning Linux.

You are clearly disillusioned with Lenovo's statements on Linux. Speaking for 
myself, I view the statements in the article that started this thread as a 
big fat non-issue. Lenovo's non-support of Linux is very similar to the 
practical positions of most other laptop manufacturers. Lenovo just decided 
to earn themselves bad karma with the free software community by publicly 
stating what amounts to industry practice, and on our most beloved brand of 
laptop no less.

- -- 
Andrew Barr | andrew.james.barr@gmail.com
http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/

"And now for something completely different."
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