I think this is really interesting. Not sure if I will have time to spare to give it a shot but I want to give them some money for trying!
I honestly don't understand why Lenovo isn't seeing a niche here, surely the entirety of the open-source community is a fairly large market in its own right. ThinkPad is the defacto "high compatibility" laptop for OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux (even Solaris, Hackintosh, Plan 9). Why has Lenovo not stepped up to actually monetize that?
If they literally just kept a production line up of the ThinkPad X220 and provide some nifty open-source stickers and a fancy website, they could almost dominate 100% of that ~5% global market. This is *surely* worth it for a few weeks worth of web developer wages (and to print out those stickers ;))?
Edit: In many ways, the idea of ThinkPad becoming *the* vendor for open-source platforms is an issue in the same way that I feel a single vendor like Apple controlling an entire ecosystem is a dumb risk for a consumer to take.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
