Firstly, why do you assume that other products are even going to be retail units for consumers?

I don't seem to remember us ever promising the empeg would be open source - you seem to assume that it just *should be* as it runs under linux. Hey, IBM sell DB/2 for linux - why the heck isn't that open source? Surely that'd make commercial sense for them! (or... in reality: probably not. All the other database vendors would nab all the clever ideas - not actually code, which would then free them from any licencing - and IBM would wish they'd not done it).

As for the accusation of us taking labours of untold hundreds - this really hurts. The empeg is pretty darn open with one exception - our player software. All the drivers and bugfixing we did in the kernel has been returned to the public. We're releasing our download protocol and even a 2.3 linux usb driver to talk to the empeg. We're open and tell people how to use the hardware, what it's capable of, and how to get the best out of it. We've done a lot of work and investigation into running linux in low-memory situations - something which it's not exactly great at, but is essential for embedded apps: something which Linus himself is rather keen on. You also seem to think that the OSS people are against non-open commerical use of their software: so, why the LGPL which allows binary modules to be linked with GPL code? (eg: AWE sound drivers from creative, etc) Why not put it in the GPL that everything running under a GPL environment must be GPL?

The reason why is that they're realistic. Sometimes a company needs to develop proprietary software - they know about commercial realities. Sometimes you can't just put up a website and some side-effort (as you need to work a normal job too) and build up an OSS project. Sometimes you need to find some great programmers and pay them whilst they work, otherwise it wouldn't get done. OSS isn't a universal panacea - as many have pointed out over the years. It is great in some areas, though.

How do you see people like Cobalt? Heck, they've taken the linux kernel, *and* apache *and* sendmail *and* (name other OSS projects here) and the system is *totally* closed! We just used the kernel, improved its support for the SA1100, and added our own code.

Hugo