OTOH, it may be an attemt to test the waters for a future buisness model that uses “monetizing of IP” as a substantial source of income. It may be an attempt to send the message to the industry “even if you are not using x86, you *really* should be using our (=WinCE et al) platform to develop your products, you know”. the Marvell plug computer, ARM and MIPS based netbooks, etc.). But the little paranoid tinfoil hat wearer in me finds it interesting that this coincides with the recent increased coverage of ARM and MIPS based devices in the main-tech press (e.g. Lawsuits take time to prepare and typically don’t happen overnight (at least not lawsuits on this scale, if experience is anything to go by). It is because of this customability that Linux (and F/OSS in general, as I agree that they could have used the vfat/fat16 patents more or less against every other player in the industry regardless of the OS) has seen such an uptake in embedded space and why for example WinCE is not the logical choice for a wide range of products. At least, that’s pretty much the situation in those areas of embedded development where I work, where seemingly every small vendor has it’s own out-of-tree kernel modules and patches for BusyBox and uClibc. But in embedded space, there is a lot more fragementation and a completly different landscape of providers, with a lot of smaller hardware shops doing heavy customisations of kernel, toolchain and userland themselves in order to accomodate different useage scenarios. It may be easy for a datacenter or a 1000-cubicles office to buy peace of mind by using the “blessed” distrobutions instead of let’s say Debian or Slackware (to name two randomly choosen examples).
#Tomtom home 2.0 license#
Then there is the issue of the “wait it’s no cross license for patents” agreements that MS did the last years. I don’t know about you, but the “stay clear of MS patented technology, they may decide to go after you one day” mantra suddenly looks a lot less like unfounded paranoia (not that I ever thought it was, but now I have a handy browser bookmark for future reference). Everytime the discussion deals with Microsoft and patents, folks on the Microsoft side of fence tend to point out that MS never did weighted their patent portfolio against a direct competitor and therefore all reservations about MS technologies and patents should be attributed to pseudo-religous zealotery of some FOSS whackos.
#Tomtom home 2.0 windows#
It may be difficult to find a larger embedded vendor that does not use Linux in one of its products, but they specifically targeted a player that is known of its involvment in Linux (on the device site, operating their devices from outside MS Windows on the user side of things is still a big PITA) even outside of the circles usually interested in embedded operating systems.
While the linux related aspects of this case seem to be circuitous, it represents a new (at least for outsiders like me) quality of relationships between Microsoft and their competitors on several levels.
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