Now that open-source is gaining attention in the general tech community and the whole world, more and more companies are making big deals of their plans to open up specifications to their products, help with Linux drivers, and generally be more friendly to the open-source community. Unfortunately, however, not all of these announcements are really followed through on. Some certainly are followed through on, such as AMD’s push to open specifications for their graphics cards, but others are not. The question is, how should people react to these announcements, not knowing if the company in question will really follow through or not? I see two possibilities.

Possibility One

The first possibility is to always respond with enthusiasm and praise the company for their steps. The advantage of this is that it lets the company see how excited people are about their move. Hopefully this will make the company more likely to follow up on their promise. The disadvantage of this, however, is that the company is rewarded before they really contribute to the open-source community.

Possibility Two

Alternatively, an argument could easily be made that the initial response should be “OK great, but show me what you have really done.” This advantage of this is that the company gets nothing for their press release, unless they follow through. This would sound like a better way, but it is not necessarily. A company could also take this response as no one cares, so let’s just leave and never really do anything. This, of course, is not what we want.

I don’t know which of these responces is the right answer. Which do you think is the best responce or is there yet another possibility that is even better?