Test / Hardware vendor & FOS relationship database?

[Laurent GUERBY]

Hi, for a few hardware products I intend to buy, I've been
looking for wether or not the hardware vendor has been helpful
to the Free & Open Source (FOS) community. May be
I missed an obvious web site, but I didn't find
anything that would help the average buyer quickly on the subject
(likely that something already exists though...).

I don't know if it is of interest to the fedora (and FOS at large) communcity,
but here is a set of ideas for a hardware vendor & FOS relation database

* how to identify the hardware: 
with both marketing names (for buyers) and internal pci/usb/... info (to be sure once you've bought
and as a key to a harware database)

=> May be a hardware dump tool that looks at dmesg, lspci, usb, ... and creates
a more or less standardized file and optionally asks the user to upload to a fedora site
(anonymously or not) would help having a complete hardware reference available to all (developper and users).
Adding the dump tool version to the output file should allow
the site to survive generations of versions and databases from
different communities to be exchanged and merged without
too much trouble.

* harware interface specification availability:  
 1. public 
 2. NDA to FOS developpers
 3. secret but easy to reverse engineer (common hardware interface)
 4. secret

* driver development: 
 1. FOS sponsored by vendor 
 2. FOS with helpful vendos
 3. FOS 
 4. mixed FOS & distributable binary (can be included in fedora, with vendor site reference)
 5. mixed FOS & non distributable binary (fedora has to reference the vendor site and the user has to download)
 6. all binary  
 7. nothing provided
 8. lawsuit threats

* driver status: 
 1. production & feature complete (on par or better than proprietary equivalents) 
 2. production with missing features 
 3. beta (should work most of the time)
 4. alpha (well you're warned)
 5. nothing available

* included in fedora kernel:
 1. yes
 2. no

* firmware upgrade: 
 1. none (all ROM) 
 2. possible from FOS OS & tools 
 3. possible only from proprietary OS & tools 

Laurent