[kwlug-disc] interesting piece on the power of open source

[Kyle Spaans]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Lori Paniak
<ldpaniak at fourpisolutions.com> wrote:
> I agree getting solid OEM support is important, but only to keep people
> from having to futz with iso images to get the Linux they want.

Makes sense to me. How about this idea: (it may or may not be different
from users "futzing" with ISO images)

Say you have an OEM/Hardware Vendor, Dell perhaps, who says "We
certify that these distros will boot and run with all necessary hardware
working". When they ship you the hardware, instead of installing one
of the distros for you, they have a special bootloader pointed at
something like http://boot.kernel.org/ (except hosted by themselves).
Then you are free to choose the distro of choice, install over the
network (the big assumption is that you've got working/"fast" internet),
and not need to download and burn ISO images.

My thought is that the vendor gets a situation kind of like Apple, where
they have a more limited pool of hardware to support. And because
they control the default repositories that their users distros will use, they
can inject patches, updates, etc. (Though, perhaps this isn't different
from sending patches upstream.)