Re: If Debian support OS certification?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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