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Linux for Home Electronics

Posted by michael on from the it's-just-better-with-the-penguin dept.

ives writes "Matsushita (Panasonic) and Sony are going to develop a Linux platform for digital home electronic devices. The nice thing is that they want to release the jointly developed source code for this project under the GPL. The press release mentions open source, the GPL and even Richard Stallman :^)."

3 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While the Sony's have lived in the modern world for awhile, and have gotten it, as well as being on both sides of it, Matsuhita electric is perhaps the most traditional and conservitive of Japanese companies. I have known these people (Matsushita) for much of my life, from some of their board members down. This is an organization so steeped in it's own traditions and dogma (yes, they really do have a "250 year" business plan, and never make fun of the founders light bulb socket :), with engineering departments so conservitivily organized, that for them to support open development of GPL software is really much like the Pope encouraging contraction!

  2. Sony has a Linux PVR on the market in Japan. by greensquare · · Score: 4, Interesting

    According to this yahoo article Sony/Panasonic already have a PVR device on the market in Japan that is using Linux called Cocoon.

    It makes sense, cost, robustness, development time,....

    And this way they don't support MS, who is their competitor.

  3. why do we care? by kr4jb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why do we care what OS runs inside of an embedded device? As long as it is reliable, I don't care if it runs QNX, VxWorks, OSE, RT Linux or any other (proven, real time) operating system.

    --
    // Alan Porter