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Asus Makes Good On Open-Sourcing Eee's Code

The other day I posted about how Asus had apparently not released all of the source code for its Linux-based Eee PC, and I branded it a goof that would be rectified soon. Looks like that was indeed the case: Asus has fixed its mistake.

For the best possible confirmation of this, I turned to Cliff Biffle's blog, Cliff Hacks Things -- he who broke the story in the first place when he reported that some key hardware drivers for the Eee weren't included in the source tarball provided by Asus.  Not long after that, Asus posted a note indicating that they had indeed provided the full source code for the Eee and were happy to get feedback from the community about it.  Cliff snagged the revised source code, and was pleased to report that yes, it looks like everything that was missing is now there.

To be honest, I never really felt like Asus was trying to pull a fast one on anyone, and a lot of the up-the-sleeve whispering that I saw on a lot of the blogs and sites devoted to open source seemed terribly off-base.  The Eee PC uses the Xandros distro, see, and that's one of those "evil" distributions that cut a deal with Microsoft, so maybe that means ... ?  Something?  Something bad?  Well, sure, and if my mother had wheels she'd a Formula One car.  Yes, keep an eye on them, by all means, but freaking out is strictly optional.

In a world where you have this many eyes, ears, and mouths keeping an eye on things -- and when most of those "organs of admittance" (as they call them in Buddhist parlance) belong to Just Plain Folks -- nothing, certainly not a GPL violation from a maker of one of the niftiest hardware products on the market right now, is going to remain unnoticed for too long.

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