Some additions/comments

Some additions/comments

Indeed. Tom Tom have been remarkably enlightened as companies approached by GPLviolations.org go. They were smart enough to employ (some of) the open tom hackers to help with their kernel 2.6 port for example.

The big potential for devices like this is to help collect input data for open geospatial data projects like openstreetmap.org. If some of the world's TomToms have software which makes it easy to collect, annotate and upload track information then we can make fairly complete road-map datasets remarkably quickly.

This stuff will no doubt be discussed at the World Free Information Infrastructure Conference on 5th/6th October in London.

On the newer TomToms with flash drives in them you have enormous potential for making cool systems which play music and movies, and log tracks, as well as doingyour navigation. Build systems like Open Embedded and Embedded Debian should make it easier to knock together small-enough systems using standard components for relatively powerful devices like this. I'd encourage anyone with an interest in the potential to help out wherever they can.