I think that a really good move, although I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement, would be the highlighting (in green say) of items in the HCL that ship with open source linux drivers or at least have open source drivers available. In other words, stuff that should work straight out of the box. I believe there would be several advantages to this:

1. People shopping for potential components can quickly and easily check which pieces of hardware have open source drivers and therefore should be ready to go.

2. People can therefore support those manufacturers who release driver code.

3. Provide a bit of "carrot and stick" to manufacturers to release said driver code

4. Improve hits to the much under-used (as far as I understand it from Jeremy's comments) HCL

5. Improve hits to the site etc, etc.

You get the idea.
Does anyone like the cut of my jib?

I think this is a wonderful idea: showing that open source drivers for hardware are preferred may encourage development of more open source drivers.

Thanks for the suggestion - we'll keep this in mind for a future version of the HCL.

--jeremy