An h-node.com client could be used in order to access the h-node.com xml database and automatically check the compatibility of the own hardware with free software. It could be a simple library used through the terminal or a complete program with a nice GUI in order to browse the hardware and interact with h-node.com. Perhaps it could be also used to submit new hardware to h-node.com.

This work could be a good starting point: http://www.h-node.com/source/ht/ismyhwok_25thSep2010-1.tar.gz

The first goal is to write a library in order to parse the xml database and automatically check the hardware compatibility with free software. It could be written in Python or C/C++, or both. Something like:

Python:

browse = Client()
browse.set_database('http://www.h-node.com/download/all/en');
browse.parse()
browse.set_output_format('xml');
browse.set_output_file('result.xml');
browse.check_compatibility(); #done by also parsing the lspci and lsusb output

The library should also alert the user if his hardware is not present inside the h-node.com database and ask the user to insert the missing hardware