The following is certainly not written on behalf of empeg, here are MY views on this:

Yours is the attitude that keeps Microsoft in business. It's the attitude that discourages mainstream manufacturers from adopting Linux in their embedded systems, and that will ensure the eventual total dominance of Windows CE in this market.

empeg are developing with Linux because in most technical ways it is the most suitable OS for their application. They had to hack at it a bit and fix quite a few things in the StrongARM distribution, but that was ok, and of course they gave back the stuff that was fixed into the distribution.

The alternative of developing with CE was discounted because nobody at empeg much liked the idea. Financially, it was an option. I don't know if you realise how much investment and capital expenditure is required to bring a product like empeg car to the market, but the cost of the Windows CE licence would not have been the most dominant figure there.

So on technical merit, and perhaps for personal reasons as well, Linux was the way to go. It seems, though, that the Linux zealots feel cheated that their OS has been used in a real world commercial application - how dare somebody write software that runs under Linux and not give it away for free!

In real terms the hardware means next to nothing to empeg - it's kind of neat, and it cost a lot to develop, but it could be reproduced in the far east within a month or so. It's the software that has value - this must be the case, otherwise why would anyone care if it was open source or not? Why would global scale OEM's get excited about it? Nobody could reproduce the software in a month - probably not even in six months. In this industry a six month head start over potential competitors can be enough to transform them into potential customers.

Empeg have produced the cutest, most programmable, most hobbyist-techogeek friendly car stereo in the world (in my opinion). They have backed this up with the most open attitude towards customer relations that I've ever experienced - trust me, you would NOT be having this conversation with Sony.

I think it's fantastically ironic that had empeg used Windows CE nobody would be complaining in the slightest about open source software - and neither would they have a RISC Linux box in their dashboard to enhance their lives ;-)

I think I'd better leave this thread for good now, if empeg is to follow in the footsteps of other evil corporate entities I can't be seen to cohort with the clients!

Rob