I bought a Sony Bravia LCD television last week and finally got around to looking at some of the paperwork that came with it.  One document caught my eye because it looked like a lot of fine print.  When I unfolded it and checked out the title I was stunned.  The title read "Required Public Statement for GPL/LGPL Licensed Software Used in This Television".  My curiosity piqued I continued to read.  Turns out Sony uses the following GPL executables in this TV:
- Monta Vista Linux Kernel
- busybox
- insmod

…and these LGPL libraries:
- libuClibc.so
- ld.so
- libc.so
- libm.so
- libpthread.so
- libgcc_s.so
- libstdc++.so

Source code for all the above is available at www.sony.com/linux (a link that right now, is not loading…)

The fact that Sony uses Linux surprised me.  Maybe it shouldn’t, I don’t know.  But it seems strange that the master of closed architectures is dipping into the OSS pool.  Are they giving back?  From the  looks of it they’re not really touting their participation nor do I recall ever seeing their contributions mentioned anywhere.  The document was "required".  There is no indication anywhere in the doc regarding what they’re doing with Linux or how it works.

I can’t put my finger on exactly why this bugs me, but somehow it does.

Posted in Software by Peter Semmelhack | on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 7:17 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.