Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

I’m sure that most people who follow developments within the open source community have read about Mark Shuttleworth’s high-end, free-software-only laptop idea. While his focus appears to be more ideologically-driven, I think such a laptop would be useful for those of us with more pragmatic concerns.

Understandably, his writing about this topic focuses mainly on the use of Ubuntu-derived distributions on such a laptop. But I think it would also be very valuable for users of systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and even Haiku.

The obvious benefit would be the ability for drivers to be written that have excellent support for the hardware being used. This has been one of the main benefits of buying a system from Apple, where you know the software you’re getting has full support for the hardware it is bundled with.

The benefit may not be as great for Solaris. After all, we have been able to buy Sun workstations for decades now, and of course Solaris integrates very well with the hardware being used. While there are UltraSPARC-based notebooks running Solaris available, Shuttleworth’s proposed laptop could bring Solaris to a wider audience.

FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD may have the most to gain from such a system. FreeBSD and NetBSD would both provide very usable, general-purpose environments. OpenBSD may even be ideal for such a laptop, where its high degree of security would prove useful when connecting wirelessly to questionable networks at universities, airports, malls, and other public areas. Not having to worry about hardware incompatibilities would likewise make such systems available to a far wider audience.

The realization of Shuttleworth’s proposal for a high-end, free-software-only laptop would be excellent for the open source community. It would allow operating systems like FreeBSD and NetBSD to become a far more viable alternative to Windows, and even to Linux to some extent. This is the sort of initiative that we all should support.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under FreeBSD, Hardware, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Open Source, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, Software, Solaris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.