[Consortium] household appliance pc

[Daniel James]

Hi Jaromil,

> i'm waiting for such a thing to be cheaply available to most people
> for the goal of my dyne:bolic: production means to the masses!

It would be interesting to know on what basis Phillips offer the 
reference hardware kit. The literature refers to 'a small real time 
operating system' which is quite likely to be Linux kernel based, 
given the features of the device. MontaVista is a partner on the 
Nexperia, but then so is Wind River. (Wind River now do Linux as well 
as proprietary RTOS though).

> it's quite interesting if it gets thru the market such a thing (as
> i was told "secretly" by some guy at philips some time ago, they
> are going such a direction) and it's supported by some free
> operating system easy to employ and able to exploit most of its
> capabilities.

I think the latter part is the key question for libre software - 'able 
to exploit'. As I see it, manufacturers are increasingly concerned 
about hardware cloning rather than unauthorised copying of software, 
and this might lead to a reluctance to publish full specs. That seems 
to be the case with the video card market already.

We need to persuade manufacturers that their products stand a better 
chance of success if they have a vibrant third-party development 
community which includes libre software developers.  

> anybody with more time for human language than code wants to team
> up to investigate opportunities of collaboration with Philips on
> such a goal?

I'd be up for that. I presume the Xiph.org team would also be 
interested in seeing Vorbis libraries on the Nexperia platform. 
Partner programme details are at: 

http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/products/nexperia/home/partner/index.html

> maybe we can employ this 
> consortium to deal with consumer grade and not only with
> professional grade market companies...

While the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum already exists to do that, 
there's plenty of crossover between the two areas when you're talking 
about consumer audio devices.

Cheers

Daniel