GPL Agreement with TomTom B.V.

Two days ago I signed an amicable agreement with TomTom B.V., a Dutch vendor of GPS navigation systems. The press release is as usual at the gpl-violations.org homepage.

According to the agreement, they have a grace period until Oct 30, but apparently they already published some source code.

Unfortunately it's still incomplete to some degree, but I'm looking forward to getting this sorted out.

Also, this source is not enough in order to run your own kernel on the TomTom GO, you will need some information on the firmware image layout and a particular blowfish key. For more details on the internals of the TomTom GO, please see the OpenTom of Christian Daniel.

I'm looking forward to convert to TomTom into a all-in-one car computer, including wardriving (USB WLAN with kismet) support and MP3/Ogg-Player with USB hard drive :) Not to forget bluetooth keyboard support, etc. :)

TomTom and your own kernel

I've started to merge the TomTom specific patches into a plain 2.4.27 kernel. Most of it is quite straight forward, since apparently they backported half of the kernel to 2.4.18-rmk6 (which is what they use as base). I don't really get it why companies still develop new products for 2.4.x, especially for really old version like 2.4.18. In the windows world, nobody still writes windows 3.11 applications, why do they start this kind of crap with Linux? *sigh*

Anyway, I'm thinking about a 2.6.x kernel port at some point, but obviously this is not an important issue on my agenda and I'd rather get some netfilter stuff running first.