Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Beating Apple

If I were trying to sell something like the Zune, I'd figure out a way to get full specs out to the open source community. Sure, there's no love for Microsoft out there, but if I'm sure someone out there would develop a linux distro just for the Zune. It's a personal media player with wifi! It would be awesome, if customers weren't limited.
Unfortunately for the industry, anyone intentionally making the type of product we really want in this area will be sued. There are too many intellectual property and patent issues flying around these things.

But a company could solve all these stupid legal issues in software but make it rather easy for someone to embed linux on it. The software that came with the device would merely be legal cover for the company. So, under this plan, Apple wouldn't be bricking all those hacked I-phones, but would be secretly cheering the hackers on.

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