On Tue, May 02, 2017 at 08:35:07AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 5:15 AM, Thomas Goirand wrote: > > > While it is nice to answer the way you did, here, Debian is missing yet > > another opportunity that other commercial distro would not. Maybe we > > should have a BoF at debconf Montreal about this. > > Please do register a BoF, I'd be happy to attend if I can.
Me, also. > > Quanta is a company shipping servers. If I'm not mistaking, they're > > located in Shanghai. One thing they used to do (and probably continue to > > do) is building servers matching open specifications from the "open > > compute" project. That really appeals to Debian moral standards, IMO. > > Thanks for the info. > > > What they are interested about, is having *us*, Debian, to certify that > > their hardware work on our system, so that their customer trust they can > > buy it to run Debian. It'd be a bit weird if they were certifying > > themselves. > > I think that Debian members/contributors do not and should not hold a > monopoly on verifying that Debian works on a particular piece of > hardware. > > I think a better approach would be to produce a Debian Live image that > on boot checks as much of the hardware as possible automatically and > lists a checklist for verifying the rest of the hardware works. Anyone > could run the image and the resulting report could be uploaded to > hardware.d.o, where it would be displayed publicly and count as a > "certification". This way users can trust Debian to run on the > hardware and there is no monopoly on certification. ISTR Ubuntu's > certification stuff works similarly except that only Ubuntu can give > the certification mark, probably in exchange for money. > > In any case, hardware vendors are in a much better position to be able > to certify that Debian runs on their hardware than we are. They know > exactly what functionality should be present and have access to get > more hardware in case running Debian bricks their devices. Wearing my DSA hat: fully agree. > > Now one idea: one way we could provide the certification would be asking > > for hardware sponsorship. This way, we (ie: the DSA team) would get > > "free" hardware, in exchange for a certification. Obviously, we'd need > > to discuss this with the DSA. > > With my DSA hat on, we don't like being guinea pigs for development > boards and pre-release hardware. This kind of hardware tends to be > unreliable and require too much hand-holding. That said, we definitely > welcome hardware sponsorship and partners. Wearing my DSA hat: fully agree. So tired of flakey hardware. Wearing my Partners hat: what value a certification that was 'bought' by donating hardware (or a variable amount of funding) to Debian. I'd prefer a declared fee structure for the service, for transparency. That said, I'd far prefer Paul's suggestion of a Live CD. > > Then we'd need a kind of "Debian certified hardware" logo that we would > > agree the certified company use for some hardware. This would need SPI > > approval, since that's the entity owning the rights for the Debian logo. > > I expect we can probably get a logo created by updating this: > > https://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/RequestArtwork > > Often it takes some promotion for the right people to notice though. -- Luca Filipozzi http://www.crowdrise.com/SupportDebian
