raison d’être
It started when I read a number of posts at Jonathan Schwartz’s blog (in order: here, here, here, here, and here).
Jonathan is Sun’s CEO (although he wasn’t at the time he started this series). The essence of it is that Sun are so stoked about their new hardware that:
So… here’s an invitation to developers and customers that don’t want to move to Solaris, want to stay on GNU/Linux, but still want to take advantage of Niagara’s (or our Galaxy system’s) energy efficiency - click here, we’ll send you a Niagara or Galaxy system, free. Write a thorough*, public review (good or bad - we just care about the fidelity/integrity of what’s written - to repeat, it can be a good review, or a poor review), we’ll let you keep the system. Free.
That sounds like a good deal to me. So I started thinking about how I might take advantage of this offer.