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Windows CE Device Emulator Goes Shared Source
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Microsoft has released their device emulator for Windows CE under a shared source license making it available to experimentation and teaching. From the article: 'The Device Emulator can be built as a standalone Windows application, or as the default emulator within Visual Studio 2005 running under the Device Emulator Manager, according to Microsoft. A 473 KB compressed file containing the Device Emulator shared source code is available for download' on the Microsoft site."
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 7/17/1838240
was posted by timothy....
Also, the license doesn't seem to allow you to use it at all, unless you happen to be attending a school or university. For example, you can't use it if you are just a hobbyist.
Of course this fits in with Bill Gates' known views that hobbyists should pay for commercial software
The strategy is to get them hooked at school, and then make them pay for the rest of their lives.
Walmart's trying to emulate Open Source? No, wait, I mean, Microsoft's trying to emulate MySpace? Sorry, too many articles about too many vile scumbags pretending to be cool in too short a period of time. I'm getting them all mixed up. :)
"All you guys who want to be Windows CE "shared source" developers, line up over here..."
*crickets*
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
Does this emulator freeze or go wonky every couple of days like real WinCE devices?
Has anyone ever seen a WinCE device that dosn't fall over frequently?
hey released the .Net Framework source code (called ROTOR) under the same license (Shared Source). Though you can't use it commercially, it actually compiles on multiple platforms. Good for students and guys working on alternate implementations, though you cant lift code from it. They also started a new code sharing community called CodePlex.
Unlike, say, Stallman, I have no problem with closed source software; I think closed source software will fail in the long run, but I also think it is perfectly legitimate for companies to attempt to make closed source software their business model.
In contrast, I think "shared source" is sleazy and evil: it's an attempt to entangle students and users in proprietary software licenses and to get people to work for Microsoft for free. Sun has tried to do the same thing with their "community licenses".
If someone offers you source code, don't look at it unless it comes under a genuine open source license; anything else is too risky.
With the SCO lawsuit dying out, it looks like MSFT needs new ways to entangle FOSS. Hence, firing execs using pure FUD against Linux, and putting on a friendly face on "open interfaces" and placing more source code we're not allowed to use out there. There is a certain class of cretin that will incorporate "shared source" code into an OSS project. The legal departments of large corporations are already terrified of FOSS (from the SCO lawsuit) and will require indemnification and eventually all OSS projects will have to go through rigorous audits to show they contain no code from tainted MSFT source releases. Thanks MSFT, for adding massive code auditing overhead to OSS development!
Ths modifies all the above. It means unless you're under this category specifically, you don't have a license for the items you mentioned.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd
have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd
= /library/en-us/wcemultimedia5/html/wce50lrfdirectd rawcreate.asp
have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).
Actually, DirectX has been a part of Windows CE for years now. It was originally part of Windows CE 2.12 with the optional DirectX Pak add-on, and available built in inside of WinCE 3.0 and onwards. WinCE4 (WinCE.NET) made it more visible, and I think WinCE 5 now supports Direct3D (Mobile).
Windows *MOBILE* only acquired DirectX as of WinMo 5 (Magneto) (the reason was to support DirectShow for camera support rather than try to do a Video4Windows thing). Of course, they didn't take the CE version of DirectX, but ported DirectX from Windows XP. Big PITA when you're trying to write a driver that supports Windows CE (part of Windows Embedded) and Windows Mobile because of these differences in DirectX.
Here's a bit from the Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 documentation on say, DirectDrawCreate()
Requirements
OS Versions: Windows CE 2.12 and later. Version 2.12 requires DXPAK 1.0 or later.
Header: Ddraw.h.
Link Library: Ddraw.lib.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url