Windows CE 6 Arrives Complete with Kernel Source 169
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has launched the sixth edition of their embedded OS Windows CE and this time has included the full source. From the article: 'Developers can now access shared source code for the Windows CE kernel -- as well as certain device drivers and application-level components -- directly from within the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 distribution package. To do this, they click on a function in the IDE that installs the shared source, and indicate their acceptance of the associated shared source license.'"
Coming Zune? (Score:1)
or am I just being optimistic, because I'm gonna buy one anyway?
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Windows CE 5 also had the source code available, I wonder why in the world this made headline news..
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Because everything Microsoft re-brands, re-issues, re-hashes gets headline news. It keeps mindshare alive and investors happy.
I hear that Vista Professional will include a text editor too. It was know as notepad in Windows 3.x
I also heard that MS chat will have video. It's been available since Netmeeting had it in 1996. Netmeeting 3.0 was by far the best video/desktop/whiteboard sharing at the time. They
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As the parent suggested, if Zune is running Windows Mobile, then it is running Windows CE. It just may not be including all capabilities that Windows CE can offer. It will only offer the capabilities defined under the Windows Mobile umbrella and any custom applications running on top of it.
The small print (Score:2)
You get to see it, but you most likely are not allowed to ship modified versions of it.
The Windows Mobile licesnce is very likely more restrictive than the WinCE6 license. That is, while you might get WinCE 6 source, don't expect to get as much source for Windows Mobile. Also, don't expect to ba allowed to ship modified source in a WM device eith
In a word, no. (Score:2)
This is kernel source, which will be the same for every CE6 device. The interesting bits would be the drivers and they would be in a devices BSP. I'm pretty sure MS won't be releasing the BSP for the Zune. For that very reason.
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http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/help/portab lemediacenter/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
The current version of Portable Media Center is PMC 2.x, which Toshiba Gigabeat uses. According to the Zune blogs, Zune doesn't run PMC 2.x, it runs it's own thing, but I assume that Windows Mobile is used underneath, particularly the kernel.
BTW, Zune isn't a "rebranded Toshiba Gigabeat", though one could say that it's derived from it. Zu
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Re:It's a super DRM device - hacking probl difficu (Score:2)
April Fools! (Score:1)
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A Trend, I'm Sure (Score:4, Interesting)
Assume the position (Score:2)
That's good because our stance as their customers had us grabbing our ankles, and our arms were starting to fall asleep.
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They will, actually (Score:2)
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Customer source licenses at least let the developer do detailed debugging, which is invaluable for embedded hardware programming.
It might make people a little more comfortable with the "closed" aspect of Microsoft being the only maintainer. As sole maintainers, they're taking responsibility for the security, reliability, and scalability of the implementation(s). They get paid rather well for the job, don't they?
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Don't be so quick. Notice the massive differences in deployment of Windows CE versus the NT series. Windows isn't opening the source for the public to see, instead, they ship the source to those parties who license it for their devices.
This is not applicable to desktop machines (I don't think HP or Dell for example would need the source of Vista for ex.).
Of course what they did is commen
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No sheeple flocked to Windows XP, but it's now at 80-90% share of all Win installs. How come so? Conspiracy?
Nope, it just comes with your next pc.
cue Admiral Ackbar (Score:3, Funny)
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That is the quote you meant, right?
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Did hell just freeze over? (Score:2)
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Allow me to reveal why this makes sense.
The GPL isn't a EULA...it's the terms of redistribution of copyrighted material. There's no need to 'click' at all, ever. The GPL only comes into play when you wish to redistribute modified versions of GPL'd software. Then you must abide by the terms, because those are the terms that the author of the co
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Agreed. In one small but notable arena, the glaring example that comes to mind is wireless routers/access points, many of which have moved from embedded Linux to things like VxWorks (Linksys for one).
Who is MS targeting this new version of CE to? (Score:3, Interesting)
What kind of portable or industrial machine is going to need those kinds of capabilities, much less have the onboard hardware to fully utilize 'em?
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Writing this on a notebook that outpaces the US$ 100K workstation of a couple years back.
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We have 4 and 8 GB flash chips the size of my thumbnail.
We'll have pocket pcs with 2 GB of ram soon.
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That's a huge leap.
What kind of portable or industrial machine is going to need those kinds of capabilities, much less have the onboard hardware to fully utilize 'em?''
At any rate, 32 processes and 32 MB per process clearly doesn't cut it anymore. It's about time they lifted those limitations.
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Remember, 640k is enough for anyone
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#define MAX_PROCESSES 32
to
#define MAX_PROCESSES 32768
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In Windows CE (prior to 6.0, at least), the process identity also meant the exact place in addressing space that the process was placed. Think about it: 32 processes at 32MB per process max, means a total needed address range of 1GB.
Check this out: http://www.addlogic.se/articles/articles/windows-
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I suppose that was the tradeoff for having an OS that ran on industrial PC's as well as poor old StrongARM embedded hardware. Working on such an embedded project, I must say I've never come across this 32MB per process limit, or the 32 processes limit. I suppose that in many cases, since WindowsCE is used mostly on OEM solutions, the application software can be designed to meet this limitation.
Talking about PalmOS, I personally think that they had a better concept than the PocketPC OS. On the Palm, onc
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Probably.
Dug
Wow ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize this isn't open source persay, but I'm very interested in it, and I wonder why they decided to open the CE kernel up. I also wonder if there is enough code to flash CE 6 onto a CE 5 device (I have a T-Mobile MDA with Windows CE 5, I wonder if I can simply drop the new kernel in there).
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With an ARM9 and that much memory, thats a full standard Linux or BSD distro.
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``I realize this isn't open source persay, but I'm very interested in it, and I wonder why they decided to open the CE kernel up.''
To reduce the competitive advantage of open source operating systems?
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As for why they're opening it up, I think the answer would be obvious- they want it to be ported to more than ARM compatible platforms, and don't want to have to pay for the development to do so.
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Last I looked they supported MIPS and SuperH as well, but that might have been a long time ago. I know some prior-generation PDAs used these.
I think there's another reason: Linux is chewing up a big part of the embedded market and we're now seeing it on phones and even PDAs. Microsoft's customers have probabl
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A few minor corrections:
- Platform Builder doesn't cost $3,000. It costs $995. And that's after a 120-day free eval.
- PB used to be its own toolchain and IDE. Now it's been integrated into VS2005. (I'm not sure how MS plans on doing the eval, though my beta was good for 180 days.)
- WinCE core licenses (no Pocket IE, no Media Player) are about $3. Upgrading to Professional (including both IE and WMP) bump it up to about $13.
Little or no advantage over embedded linux (Score:3, Insightful)
My company invested a lot of time in implementing and setting up our own toolchain and utilities, support libraries etc around the linux kernel. What we end up with is a redistributable result with no liscencing whatsoever.
Of course, it requires you be able to work to produce a flash image and toolchain. Once that pain is dealt with..and there is pain, a lot of it on a custom board.. then you're free to do whatever you want.
x1000's, people count pennies, and WinCE is not pennies.
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Well, it's from _Microsoft_ and it's called _Windows_, so it's obviously the best and the user-friendliest and what everybody runs and has the best hardware support and all that.
Beat that, Lunix!
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We do a lot of embedded linux projects - mainly custom boards, done around some sort of ARM chip with standard connectivity - LCD, ethernet, or wireless options.
NetBSD [netbsd.org] is also extensively used in similar situations, so it goes.
The Hardware Wars and the future of free software. (Score:2)
If you'd like to hear a very well-spoken argument to explain how unique the GNU/Linux system is in the market for small portable computers, listen to Eben Moglen's talk from the 2006 FSF Associate Member meeting [fsf.org] in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This talk was a hit in its own right and a highlight of the day's events. This talk is called "The Hardware Wars and the future of free software". Other talks from the meeting are online as well [fsf.org].
While it's a shame that the entire OS isn't free software, I would love
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You're correct that you don't have to host it yourself (if all you're doing is redistributing someone else's code - you obviously have to make your own changes available somehow). You're incorrect that it can just be printed on napkins. The GPL stipulates that you offer "the complete corresponding machine-readable source code... on a
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Our own code, is licensed as we deem fit based on the application and client.
Open Source for MS? (Score:2, Insightful)
This must mean Windows CE has some flaws their developpers can't figure out.
License details? (Score:2)
Re:License details? (Score:4, Informative)
Heralded by E-Voting Proponents (Score:3, Insightful)
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I doubt they run CE. MS Access doesn't work on CE, does it?
Thanks! (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't know if that's the case here, but I wouldn't get my hopes up too much.
Now I hope ... (Score:2)
(No image editor was used to create this image. They just forgot to set the read-only flag for that form.
microsoft open source projects (Score:3, Informative)
Wix:
A toolset for building installer packages on windows. Supposedly one of the better ones.
license: cpl
http://wix.sourceforge.net/index.html [sourceforge.net]
WTL:
An extension to the ATL. Probably the best toolkit for developing win32 guis in c++ (lightweight and powerful). It's hampered by the fact that documentation for it is scatered around the net (mostly on the code project) and so mostly people usually end up learning about it by reading through the largely uncommented source.
license: cpl (alternately available under a different, maybe equiavent license if downloaded from microsofts site)
http://wtl.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Rotor:
A cross platform implementation of the
License: shared source
http://research.microsoft.com/programs/europe/rot
Windows CE:
Mentioned in article. I think they release it under this license for custimization and debuggin purposes.
License: shared source
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/L
Licenses:
So far microsoft seems to use the shared source license and the CPL license.
The shared source license is relatively restrictive, and generally leaves microsoft with most of the power over issues of reditribution and use of source. Shared source seems to be largely used to distribute code for educational, debugging, and customization uses.
The CPL is a full blown open source/free software license that was actually written by IBM and I believe is the license that eclipse is distributed under (only under a different name). Community projects like Wix and WTL are being handled under this license.
My impression from talking to microsoft guys and from working there briefly is that the antipathy felt towards linux and open source is not particularly pervasive in the company. I've met a few people who had negative misconceptions about open source, but whatever the average slashdotter might think microsoft tends to hire smart people who are aware of industry trends and best practices including oss.
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It has a nice ARM emulator with JIT recompilation if you're interested in that sort of thing.
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A license you forgot (Score:2)
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http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectNam
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Is this new? (Score:2)
Microsoft Embedded Marketing (Score:2)
1) You need to have a passport account to even download the CE 6 evaluation kit.
2) You need to purchase the Microsoft YOU_NEED_AN_ARMY_OF_LAWYERS_TO_READ_AND_SIGN_THIS_ LICENSE (TM) License Agreement.
3) From what I understand, when you finally get authorized to see the source, you can only look. You can't touch/modify/customize it for
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This license is perfectly simple to understand: Microsoft grants you the right to bend over and spread your cheeks, while you give Microsoft the right to
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Wow, you both seem to be trolling. The Microsoft Shared Source Licenses [microsoft.com] are actually quite simple to read and easy to understand. The GPL is actually far more complex, imho.
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IMHO, your opinion is lacking. By calling me a TROLL, serves no purpose. You didn't read the article or reseach anything before your non-sense post.
GPL = you can use for free,ship for free, and cannot change without giving changes back.
I can benchmark and publish results. Its a pretty simple license.
In order to explain what CE 6.0 OS a
They had to do it. (Score:2, Interesting)
I recently worked in a shop which did development in both WinCE and Linux. The source code has been available for WinCE for quite a while, under NDA.
Truth be told, they had to open the source code. The Linux group consistently delivered features before the WinCE guys. The problem was that anyone hired for WinCE development had a substantial ramp up time, whereas we could hire engineers who already knew Linux.
The open source nature of Linux allowed us to hire engineers already proficient in writing
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While I don't really disagree with you about Linux/CE, I'll present the same story but from a different standpoint. We use 3 main OSes for development: Linux, VxWorks and WinCE. The other day we received a code drop for a Linux wireless client from a major vendor everyone has heard of. It was a piece of crap. That's great that it was open source, but it w
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It seems the story is about how crap support you got from the linux company compared to MS, rather than any open/closed source issue.
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Yes, but who has the options? (Score:3, Interesting)
So why didn't you hold the vendor accountable for the poor quality? You seemed to expect Microsoft to fix its bugs, why didn't you expect the same service from vendor X?
While MS certainly did respond quickly, they always had the option of ignoring you. Fortunately for you, they paid attention to your problem. I'll bet that a lot of other people were also experiencing the same problem.
However, what do you do when you find yourself with a problem that you can't reliably reproduce, or one that the ve
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Now that that's out of the way...
Saying that "source code gives *you* options" is a nice aphorism, but in real life scenarios I don't think it means that much. Sure, we have the option of hiring any number of Linux/wireless engineers to fix Vendor X's (VX) bugs. Why would we want to do that when we're pushing VX* to fix their own bugs?!
VX has had a team of half a dozen engineers or so working on
Windows: my favorite paperweight (Score:2)
That explains why it makes such a great doorstop... :-)
And once you accept... (Score:2)
Big deal. (Score:2)
On the other hand, the ReactOS [reactos.org] Kernel and entire OS is open source, and I'd much rather see people try to convert ReactOS 0.30 to Windows CE devices and develop drivers for it. No Catch-22 there, but it is free as in speech not as in beer, still it is free to download and look and wor
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The iPaq with a SD card was playing MP3s before the iPod was invented. There was even a Compact Flash HD card with 1G or 2G of a small hard drive from IBM for the iPaq before the original iPod. Windows CE was playing MP3s before the iPod was even invented. I had forgotten about that because I wo
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Besides I found out the battery is dead and won't hold a charge with the recharge, and it only works in the cradle yet needs a full battery charge to synch up with Windows to even attempt a Linux install. I am on disability and cannot afford a new battery yet.
Which MS license is it under? (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, following a long to an older article, I read: In terms of impact to Microsoft's Windows CE Shared Source and Shared Platforms initiatives, Windows Embedded product manager Nic Sagez told WindowsForDevices.com that these programs are not migrating to the new licenses any time soon. However, Sagez did not rule out the possibility of a longer term change, based on customer feedback and market requirements.
Back to TFA: For the first time, Microsoft is making 100 percent of the source code of the Windows CE kernel available as part of the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 operating system package, to everyone who gets the OS package.... but nowhere does it explain just which of the many licenses described in the earlier article [windowsfordevices.com] is actually being used. It seems disingenuous to "touts the terms of its BSD-like shared source license" if the license it's using isn't BSD-like... and, clearly, it's not:
Developers and companies are permitted to use the evaluation version to begin their projects, and need not pay anything to Microsoft until the time limit expires, after which a non-evaluation version is available for $995 -- or when they begin to ship product that requires run-time royalties, Microsoft says.
Run-time royalties? BSD-like license? Please!
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IANAL but I think the main difference between the Ms-PL and the BSDL is the Ms-PL term 3B:
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The point isn't "does MS have a BSD-like license".
The point is "if they're going to tout their BSD-like license when talking about Windows CE, they bloody well better be using that license for Windows CE".
Because they're obviously not. Which one are they using? Do you know?
Linux on Palm Sized PC's (Score:2)
...indicate their acceptance... (Score:2)
I. By reading the code contained herein User agrees to give up their First Born Child. If User is also Slashdot poster and will never conceive said Child, the User agrees to remit a pound of flesh from a location of Microsoft's choosing.
II. If User has recently purchased a computer running Linus or OS X, user shall be required to set said computer on fire before reading the code. See Sony Bat
A difference of degree (Score:3, Interesting)
I think they're lowering the cost for everyone. It turns out that most companies that are making a CE product want the source. MS didn't charge for it (well, the CE licenses were pretty expensive to begin with), and it was just costing everybody lawyer-hours.
-- Hamster
Following the bandwagon (Score:2)
Back in the 19th century there was much heated debate over whether AC or DC would be better for power distribution. DC had all the big money behind it, but AC had the Laws of Nature behind it. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most of what we know today about electronics, would never have been discovered if we were still trying to distribute DC power.
Edison and hi
Linus Torvalds working for MSFT after all??? (Score:2)
Hey -- if Apple fanatics are right, then MS will do something to further imitate Mac OS X, and OpenWinCE under Avalon 2.0 (et al) and dropping all backward compatibility makes more sense than Torvalds taking over the kernel team in Redmond.
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This software isn't even open source, it's shared source [wikipedia.org]. I don't know what the exact terms of the license are, but it's a safe bet you won't be allowed to distribute the code, distribute modified versions of the code, or incorporate the code in a commercial product. Past shared source licenses have disallowed making modifications to the code for in-house use, too.