In the past I’ve written about how LINBIT uses open source software throughout our infrastructure. Our commitment to open source extends further than our code and our business applications. We also support the hardware vendors that contribute back to the open source community. One such vendor is System76.
We’ve used their hardware for servers, laptops, and desktops. A System76 server houses an internal file share along with our accounting software, and one of their workstations acts as the hypervisor for testing the LINBIT deployment tool. That workstation has done a lot of work this year. Every full run of the testing matrix I described last quarter takes me about 12 hours, and a good share of that happens on a machine from System76.
We chose System76 because their core values and commitment to the open source community are more than just words. In addition to creating and maintaining Pop!_OS and their recently released COSMIC desktop, they have also developed and contributed to open source firmware. As many of us know, open source firmware can be a challenge to find.
System76 have ported a long list of their laptops to coreboot and pushed the majority of those changes upstream, including fixes that improve coreboot for every other vendor shipping it. They spent considerable effort opening up embedded controller (EC) firmware, which other manufacturers have since picked up. They have even gone so far as to obtain the OSHWA open hardware certification for their fan and drive controller.
The pattern should look familiar to anyone who follows what we do. DRBD and LINSTOR are open source, DRBD has been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2010. Being upstream means the code is reviewed, maintained, and available to anyone running Linux. As I’ve written before, having more users means more testing, more real-world deployments, and more issues found, and all of that comes back to us and enables LINBIT to make better software.
System76 made a similar choice with COSMIC. They funded a multi-year desktop rewrite and then packaged it for numerous distributions. There’s no lead-generation logic in making your software run well on distributions that aren’t tied into selling a single one of your machines. You do that because you think the software should exist.
A more direct parallel is what happens if either LINBIT or System76 changes its business course. Anyone who sat through the last two years of conference conversations likely knows how that goes. After the Broadcom deal, most of our conference booth traffic was people looking for somewhere else to go. Open source provides a light to those in the darkness. DRBD and LINSTOR are both open source, so a customer running them today keeps running them no matter what we decide next quarter. Same on the System76 side. Pop!_OS, COSMIC, and the coreboot work are upstream and in other people’s hands, and none of those needs System76’s permission to keep existing.
Every company running Linux benefits from somebody doing the unglamorous work of upstreaming coreboot ports and liberating EC firmware. Very few of them pay for it. Buying from vendors who contribute back to the open source community is one of the more direct ways to fund the commons the rest of us build on, and when the hardware is good it costs you nothing extra. In our case it has been good, which makes it easy for me to recommend it.
