[Freedombox-discuss] Debian GNU/Linux on tablet hardware

Robinson Tryon bishop.robinson at gmail.com
Mon Oct 31 22:52:32 UTC 2011


On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Brian Bartholomew <bb at stat.ufl.edu> wrote:
>> i'm not asking people for a "committment to buy".  i'm asking people
>> if they would be *willing* to commit to buying, if a certain threshold
>> of other people also publicly made the exact same committment.
>
> If the result was a turnkey working Linux system, I would buy one or two
> at $100/each to inspire somebody to initially build them.

I'm willing to spend at least $100 each year on some hardware from the
FreedomBox project that will run a useful system for me. And I think
that you can line up 99 other supporters without hardly any effort.

The key things here are

1) Hit a sweet price point

Something about $100 means that more people will be willing to buy-in
to the system. And that sounds like a good "second wind" for the
project.

2) Market the system as Free-software friendly

Tout the fact that 100% of the source for the device is available.

3) Make the system useful

The glorious vision of the FreedomBox isn't here yet. And that's okay.
All you need to do is get a good enough hardware + software mix that
people find it *useful*, even if minimally so.

Right now I would pay $100 for a little box that could run three
useful applications:
  a) SSH
  b) Web server
  c) Mail server


If group-buys of hardware can help the FreedomBox project, then I'm
more than happy to sign on. It also can give people like me a tangible
item to show off to my friends -- and maybe get them to buy one, or at
least pay more attention to the project. And that kind of community
growing is very valuable to the project.

--R



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