Opensourced Netwinder?

Ben Tilly wrote in to write an interesting report on the NetWinders, and the fact that the hardware might be open sourced. I've now heard this rumor from 3 seperate sources, and tho I can't confirm it, it sounds cool. God I want one of those things- especially if the video stuff works under Linux. Anyway, hit the link to read Ben's notes on the subject.

Ben writes:

1. The Netwinder is a lot cooler than I thought
2. Corel decided to open-source the internal schematics about 10 days ago
3. Both the engineer and suit said they didn't mind the rumor leaking

So here it is. *Every* netwinder comes with 2 Ethernet ports, EE/ECP port, serial port, IrDA capability, parallel port support, microphone/speaker, duplex stereo in/out, NTSC/PAL video in/out etc. They don't know their target market, so it has built-in hardware support to be turned into a server, router, answering machine/fax, video conferencing (web TV?), etc. Or all at the same time. On a 12V battery. Thinking of getting one? Do it now. Their sales are in the hundreds. They are still trying to find a market. Get one, play with it, show it to friends, and get back to Corel on how to market it. They could really use the support. (Tip. Early next year they will be shipping clusters of these things for high-availability web-servers, Beowulf, etc.) ( CT:San showed me a clustered netwinder cluster at ALS- pretty sweet. And it runs cool so they can slap a ton of them together. And each motherboard talks to the others over SCSI.)

Now for the big news. To try to get mindshare for the hardware platform, they will be making the complete schematics to the daughterboard open source. What they will not open up is the mother-board, or about 20k of code in their boot-loader. (*All* of the rest of their code for this has been open-sourced already.) As Pat said, "If you want to build a clone of the Netwinder we will tell you what we have, who we got it from, and give you phone numbers".

No details on licenses, when official word comes, etc.

CT:Video in/out and full duplex sound? How about these things as a low end video conferencing solution? They make them with decent sized harddrives- how about a CD-ROM drive and mp3 encoder and selling them as an alternative to your stereo? They run on next to no juice, slap on an LCD screen and make laptops. I've heard a lot of people rave about the StrongARM stuff, this thing has a ton of potential. What do you guys think?