Yesterday I wrote a blog about what hardware vendors need to provide so I can write them a fwupd plugin. A few people contacted me telling me that I should make it more generic, as I shouldn’t be the central point of failure in this whole ecosystem. The sensible thing, of course, is growing the “community” instead, and building up a set of (paid) consultants that can help the OEMs and ODMs, only getting me involved to review pull requests or for general advice. This would certainly reduce my current feeling of working at 100% and trying to avoid burnout.
As a first step, I’ve created an official page that will list any consulting companies that I feel are suitable to recommend for help with fwupd and the LVFS. The hardware vendors would love to throw money at this stuff, so they don’t have to care about upstream project release schedules and dealing with a gumpy maintainer like me. I’ve pinged the usual awesome people like Igalia, and hopefully more companies will be added to this list during the next few days.
If you do want your open-source consultancy to be added, please email me a two paragraph corporate-friendly blurb I can include on that new page, also with a link I can use for the “more details” button. If you’re someone I’ve not worked with before, you should be in a position to explain the difference between a capsule update and a DFU update, and be able to tell me what a version format is. I don’t want to be listing companies that don’t understand what fwupd actually is :)
Awesome!
Hope to see that list grow over time.
I’m bookmarking any consulting company added to that list, get your company up there! :D