For years, device and peripheral builders could get away with ignoring the Linux desktop market. It was too small to matter, they would say. Things have changed. At the Linux Foundation meeting in Austin, Texas, last month, major PC vendors ASUS, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo said they would be telling their chipset, component, and peripheral OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that they were going to demand Linux-compatible hardware from them.
It is also noteworthy that Luis R. Rodriguez, a leading developer on the ath5K reverse-engineered, open source Atheros driver project, announced on April 15 that Atheros has hired him "as a full time employee, as a software engineer, to help them with their goals and mission to get every device of Atheros supported upstream in the Linux kernel."
http://www.linux.com/feature/134125