I must take issue with your lauding the praises of consumer-hackable systems. While this is interesting to the hacker community, most consumer-electronics manufacturers want to keep you from prying open the hood and tinkering with the engine, and for good reasons. In some cases they're trying to protect their IP; in other cases they've built a cellular-like subscription model into their product and produce hardware below cost. One can make the argument that just this sort of practice led to the demise of companies such as Netpliance.

As a manufacturer, I would want to be able to build a product with my proprietary code and/or electronics, safe in the knowledge that some bored teenager isn't going to lift the code and post it on the Net. If embedded Linux cannot ensure that to me, I'm going to look at another platform, and this is bad both for the manufacturer, the consumer and ultimately for Linux.

--Sean T. LamontInnovative Communications

The Netpliance i-opener was sold with QNX, not Linux, installed.

--Editor

I was wondering which company provides the best embedded Linux education. There seems to be a slew of companies out there willing to teach classes on this topic.

Do you guys have any input of better quality classes out there?

--Alex Lee

Please see our review of MontaVista's traning class on page 44.

--Editor

"Hack Embedded Linux for Fun and Prizes'' winner Jathan W. Manley is with the solar car racing team of Michigan Technological University, not the University of Michigan. For more information about Michigan Tech you can visit the University web site at http://www.mtu.edu/.

Coming Next Month: Are We an RTOS Yet?