Re: [RE: [oc] What about Crusoe]

["Jecel Assumpcao Jr." <jecel@merlintec.com>]

Joe Zott wrote:
> Based on published reports, Transmeta has been in business for 5 years and
> has 200 employees. There is not an open source hardware business model that
> can support that type of company and provide a sufficient return on the
> investment required to start such a company.

As far as I know, they haven't sold anything in those five years, and so have
made as much money so far as if they had open hardware :-)

My own alternative is to have two licenses: an open hardware one that doesn't
allow you to use your name with the resulting products (acceptable for personal
use and small companies, but not for large, high volume production) and a
regular one that requires the payment of royalties but doesn't have the name
restriction. Of course, I haven't made any money so far either so I can't
yet claim this is a good idea. And it will probably only work for whole
products, not a collection of cores.

> But why does a semiconductor company doing processors announce an operating
> system? As I understand it they are not using generic embedded Linux, but
> one with proprietary optimizations for the Crusoe processor. Very strange.

The two articles I read in Byte (http://www.byte.com) today claimed this, but
it flatly contradicts what was said at the Transmeta introduction. Linus was
asked if their was going to be a native version of Linux and he said they tried
compiling directly to VLIW but got no measurable increase in speed relative to
the X86 version running with code morphing, so they were *not* going to release
any special Crusoe versions of Linux. I found that a bit hard to believe, but
have seen no information from anybody who knows to support what the Byte people
have said.

-- Jecel