I don't understand this at all. Oracle released a port of their database management system for Linux and it wasn't magically required to become open-source. For that matter, your own empeg player application is closed-source and no one has any problems with that. How would any other application differ?

Embedded systems tend to need everything, including the kernel, linked together into a single binary. Certainly Ecos does, the OS used on Karma. In that situation you don't have the kernel/userland "firewall", uncrossable by the GPL, which keeps a Linux kernel and Oracle userland DBMS separate.

DRM licences tend to further require that licensees make it impossible to write a "Total Recorder"-style program for their products, a promise we couldn't make if the kernel were modifiable by all.

Peter