We need distributions for the embedded world

I believe the embedded platform developers currently are in a stage where the general
PC-platform world was around 1995. At that stage some of the hardware providers started to
understand the benefit of providing drivers for linux, but they had not not quite grasped how
to contribute yet.

In the embedded and linux phone world we're now seing the same thing. The hardware developers
have been consumers of open source for quite some time, and are now starting to grasp the
benefits of being a open source provider too. Unfortunately the stumble a bit on how and where
to contribute.

What I'm hoping we'll see is one or several distributions (maybe like maemo or openmoko) that
specifically target the embedded world. Such targeted distributions could act as a natural
point for contributions from embedded hardware vendors.

Unfortunately, what we've got so far are each hardware vendor creating a dist for his specific
hardware, and not being too cooperative with others, I'm having a hard time seeing that
cathedral like approach succeeding in the long run, regardless if it is open source or not.