Some time ago I wrote about the tireless Grazinano Sorbaioli and his campaign to convince DELL to start selling a free software computer . I received an email from him this afternoon asking everyone to "vote to convince Dell to preinstall gNewSense on their computers."
Please read more about it here on this Ideastorm page.
The idea is to offer a line of laptops and desktop PCs whose hardware perfectly fits what this GNU/Linux distribution supports (and it doesn't support only a few hardware devices, notably some wifi chips and some Nvidia and ATI cards). It should be quite possible to build a system that doesn't contain any such unsupported parts.
The benefits of doing this is offering a choice for those who wish to have a completely legally free operating system working out of the box on Dell computers. There is a great number of people within the Free Software community who would appreciate having such a choice and would buy it for themselves and recommend it to their relatives and friends.
It would also certainly attract attention of the Free Software Foundation which would publicly commend Dell for offering this choice, which is very good for bettering Dell's reputation within the whole of Free Software and Open Source movements.
If Dell decides to do this, they should brand these boxes by the correct terminology, calling the operating system they are offering as "GNU/Linux" because the GNU Project, sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, started what we today know as GNU/Linux, a popular free operating system that rivals Microsoft Windows. Many of the core and essential components of the OS come from the GNU project.
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