Buy your hardware from open source friendly vendors. When making decisions or recommendations regarding your organization’s equipment purchases, tell suppliers that open source friendliness is a factor in your purchasing decision.

Let hardware vendors know what you think about their support (or lack thereof ) for your favorite operating system. Some hardware vendors have been quite helpful, supplying both sample units and programmer documentation. Others have been less forthcoming or downright hostile. Both kinds of vendors, and the ones in between, need encouragement. Write to them and tell them what you think they are doing right and what they can do to improve. If, for example, a vendor has refused to make programming documentation available, or available only under an NDA, a reasoned, well-formulated letter from a potential customer could make the difference.

Help test systems and check out the drivers for hardware you are interested in. If a driver exists or is being developed, the developers are always interested in reports on how their code behaves on other people’s equipment. Reports that the system is working fine are always appreciated, but bug reports with detailed descriptions of what goes wrong are even more essential to creating and maintaining a high-quality system.

Donate hardware or money. The developers can always use hardware to develop on, and money certainly helps for day-to-day needs. If you can donate money or hardware, check out the projects’ donations page (http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html for OpenBSD)^[47] or items-needed page (http://www.openbsd.org/want.html for OpenBSD). Donations to OpenBSD will most likely help PF development, but if you prefer to donate to FreeBSD, NetBSD, or DragonFly BSD instead, you can find information about how to do so at their websites.