Hardware integration is an integral part of any software gaining acceptance as a standard. Ubuntu should be one of the options I see on the drop down menu when buying a PC under the OS header. Canonical should establish an organization within the Ubuntu development team that is exclusively devoted to gaining increased cooperation among hardware manufacturers. Corporate relationships should be as much a focus of Canonical's development cycle as bug fixing and software improvements. Some inroads have been made with Dell, but even then there is still a whole separate page to which one has to navigate just to get there.
UPDATE: A couple of posters have suggested that any Alliance should be a general pan-Linux multi-distribution effort. I disagree, because the community in general does not possess the organizational structure conducive to making corporate agreements. A number of barriers prevent blanket "all distros treated equal" from ever being feasible. Firstly, there is no limit to the number of Linux distros that may potentially be forked in the future. A hardware maker's cost of manufacturing increases proportionally to the complexity of manufacture. Since the OS and its related drivers make a major component of this cost, it does not behoove an MID or PC maker to support n(squared) versions of Linux, especially considering that in the minds of most consumers, Linux is Linux is Linux (if they even know what Linux is at all). Taken to the extreme, what if I personally decided to make my own fork of Red Hat, and called it Purple Glove -- should I expect Lenovo to support my effort?
I am not knocking Mandrake/SLED/Red Hat/(fill in the blank), I think well of them all. Nonetheless, this being a brainstorm for how UBUNTU may improve, I think it only natural an Hardware Alliance would be implicitly an UBUNTU Hardware Alliance, not a generic Linux Hardware Alliance. Canonical is a money making venture, but there is nothing bad with that.
On a side note to supporters of other distros: They give their wares away to the public for free, and are thus a "Positive Externality" in economic parlance. Under the GPL, anyone can take the sum of their product and edit or fork it any way they want. I say, if they formed an Ubuntu Hardware Alliance, this positive externality could be spread even farther, Cononical would make even more money, develop more great software(+ hardware integration), and give even more back to the world -- it is a virtuous cycle.
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