I'd like to think that's something people could value, but I always hear there's no market?
I wonder if it exists at all now?
i think of course only by being open source, maybe its not enough.. dont know how your project is of course.. but its good to have something that distinguish from the other stuff around.. but it can attrack attention from the geek market.. thats what firefox-os are doing after getting late in this crowded party that is the smartphone industry..
But I definitely agree that early adopters will be hackers, developer and tech people.
If I were to have a mantra it would be: "Get everyone who is a Linux developer/user and their moms' to buy this laptop."
My mom is probably my first sale, she already uses Elementary OS(Ubuntu based) and she loves it, she's never going back to Windows.
If Apple open-sourced their code, how long do you think it will take before a dozen cheap chinese knock-offs appear with an almost exact replica of iOS? Thus killing off a huge market share for them. At least at the moment, the user experience of those cheap knock-offs is vastly inferior.
Although a nice sentiment, but too far fetch from reality.
I don't even think firmware is what's maintaining their "competitive advantage". That firmware needs to be matched with the hardware anyway, and it's really the hardware that offers the competitive advantage. So I think the "competitive advantage" they get from closed firmware is mostly imaginary for most companies. We should push them to "think different".
Better yet, we should demand to open source their firmware if they want our trust, after all of this.