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New Sidekick Will Run NetBSD, Not Windows CE
jschauma writes "Many sites are reporting that the next Sidekick LX 2009/Blade, from Danger (acquired by Microsoft early in 2008), is going to run NetBSD as their operating system, causing Microsoft's recruiters to look for NetBSD developers."
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Is there a problem with Microsoft using BSD code in their proprietary products? The developers clearly understood that was a potential outcome when they placed their code under a BSD license. As a result, they probably don't mind
That said, would it be nice to have seen MS contribute some code back? Yes, but that was not required by the license so there is no problem. That is the whole point of the BSD-style licenses: you can take my code and do whatever you want with it; you are under no further obligation to me.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
No, this is notable because it's an open admission that WinCE can't cut it .
Not really. Someone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, development was well underway when Danger got bought by MS. That means it was likely cheaper to just continue doing what they were doing rather than scrap the work and start again using Microsoft's stuff. Not to say that something like that would have been unheard of, but it would have delayed a product that they wanted to get out the door. The real test will be whether the next iteration of this hardware runs this same OS or whether it comes with WinMo/WinCE.
This poo is cold.
You mean, Hotmail used to run FreeBSD before Microsoft bought it, and for the 4+ years it took them to migrate it over to Windows without failing?
Hotmail itself has never run on Linux. It may however have some of its content delivered by Akamai's CDN, which does run Linux (but not Apache).
http://astutehosting.com/
Seriously, this isn't surprising... NetBSD runs on everything. The NetBSD team spends a significant amount of time supporting a large number of platforms - be it a modern X86 server or a sun pizza box.
You'll notice that commercial entities like the BSD license (see: OS X) And, I don't think that the NetBSD developers will suddenly panic: "Someone's going to steal our code!" Contrary to what some here might feel, there is room for more than one open source operating system and, believe it or not, more than one license.
Back in the old days, slashdot had the BSD link right on the front page.