Richard Hughes, Linux App Summit:
The LVFS started as a side project running on a server under my stairs. In the last five years we’ve grown fwupd and the LVFS to the point where it’s a Linux Foundation project, listed on government purchase requirements and included on the CVs of people looking for jobs in the industry. Vendors now need to interact with the ecosystem we’ve built to get the Works With ChromeBook certification from Google, and Lenovo and Dell choose hardware partners based on how they work upstream with the LVFS and fwupd.
In the last 5 years we’ve built something that dozens of people are paid to work on and has provided more than 25 million firmware files to end users. We have used a few tricks over the years to convince vendors to “join the LVFS” and this talk will give lots of examples on how we grew the ecosystem from nothing into something that CTOs talk about over lunch.
I think a lot of the problems I’ve encountered building this project might be interesting to people trying to build a similar app ecosystem for Linux users.
