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So all they're doing is letting total strangers who aren't even contractors to the company have a peek at the crown jewels.

OTOH, It seems like they bought empeg just to let let anyone who buys sigmatel chips use the code, so in some way they must have some system in place for licensing out the code.

As to rolling our own, I'm not sure how much serious thought has been given to it. Every time it comes up, people mention how many man-years have been put into the code base, and how impossible that would be to match. What they don't generally take into account is that empeg wasn't open source, and therefore couldn't reuse open source software. Things that are available to us are decoder libraries, the kernel, vfd lib, emphatic, mp3tofid and jemplode to name just a few. It certainly wouldn't be easy, but it certainly wouldn't be nearly as hard as doing it the first time as a closed source application.

I personally vote we have Dan Wallach part it out to various undergrads the next time he teaches a intermediate level programming course.

Matthew