So they've got to decide how that's going to affect those relationships, because if they go the route of competing with these guys, there are a lot of comparisons that people are going to make. Suddenly they're competing with people they were teaming up with before. That's really hard to do, and even harder to do well. This isn't the first time developer-tools companies have had to compete with a company that offers both an operating system and development tools. Metrowerks' and Cygnus's desktop and embedded offerings are in more direct competition, however.
Few people buy applications that are development tools and libraries.
The unwashed masses mostly want things like Web browsers, word processors, e-mail clients, spreadsheets, and games. Red Hat's still got a ways to go before they're a one-stop shop. The most popular is the GNU General Public License. Cygnus, on the other hand, relies on several licenses, including some that aren't open source at all. Cygnus's Code Fusion is proprietary, for example, and its eCos embedded OS is licensed using a variation of the Mozilla Public License .