does sony and linux (os) have any relation?
Monday, September 6th, 2010 at
06:48
I was just wondering if sony make linux and if they didn’t, did sony make an os?
Filed under: Linux
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The short answer is that most technical departments around the world now use Linux for some tasks, so there are engineers who use Linux at Sony in Japan but their uses of Linux are considered trade secrets for the most part and even most open source advocates with knowledge of the situation see nothing wring with that — the GPL uses copyright law to give itself teeth and here in the US people have been held liable for statutory, as well as actual, damages so one or two infringers have found that they were paying far more for their actions than they had figured into their cost of doing business. The GPL is against vendor lock-in and other abuses. It is not against proprietary information.
They do not themselves create a version of Linux for distribution. They have hired Yellow Dog Linux, which formerly made a linux for imacs which used the PowerPC chip, to sell a Linux for their Playstation 3 with a Cell Chip and have been known to work with other distributors when working on systems for corporate clients. In fact very little development of Linux goes on in Asian countries. A lot of development of applications for Linux goes on there but there seems to be little infrastructure for work on the OS itself, as opposed to Europe, the US and Australia where a lot gets done.
Short answer:
No. They aren’t related. Sony doesn’t not make their own OS either.
Long Answer:
http://www.wikipedia.org
No, there’s no relationship.
Linux was started as a graduate school project by Linus Torvalds, who lived in Finland. He placed the source code for his original Linux kernel on the Usenet back in 1992, and told people to hack away at it. Eventually, a group of people began building things for it and porting public domain and open source unix code to Linux. The rest is history.
Linus is still the maintainer of the Linux kernel today. He has the last say on anything going into the kernel code.