I spent a good chunk of today writing a technical whitepaper titled Introducing the Linux Vendor Firmware Service — I’d really appreciate any comments, either from people who have seen all progress from the start or who don’t know anything about it at all.
Typos, or more general comments are all welcome and once I’ve got something a bit more polished I’ll be sending this to some important suits in a few well known companies. Thanks for any help!
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hughsie
Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management.
Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.
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This looks like a good idea! Awesome!
However, the whitepaper is missing a glossary at the beginning with a list of the acronyms used. Since there are a lot of them, it would really improve the reading experience.
A sequence diagram (UML or otherwise) would help in the “LVFS” section.
I can guess vendors will be interested to know if there is a webservice that they can use for automating the upload.
It is not clear why the paragraph “Conclusions” is so titled. “Testimonials” or “Usage statistics” is more apt: you are not purporting a thesis or drawing any logical conclusion due to a study you performed. Rather, it is an hypothesis you are making (“using anything other than the LVFS to distribute firmware for Linux users would not make sense”). It lacks substantiation, using technical arguments or other quantifiable means.
Citations would be better if numbered, and referenced also inside the text at the appropriate point.
I’ve added a Glossary at the end and made the citations numbered and referenced in the text. I’ll think about an architecture diagram; it probably needs to look beautiful. I really appreciate the review, thanks.