Gosh

Indeed. Linaro was/is canonical-bootstrapped (as a good way to get an engineering organisation going quickly). I've no idea how the money works but it is probably either neutral or going the other way (for the use of all their kit and engineers).

On the 'embedded' point, I have to disagree with khim. ARM is not all systems you never change the OS on, and even to the extent that that is true (a lot of random and fairly closed consumer kit) it's still the wrong way to think about it. ARM is just another architecture, like intel x86 and MIPS, and you can make whatever sort of computer you like out of it. Early ARM machines (when I got started in early 1990s) were full desktop machines, driving monitors, with harddrives and having plug-in keyboards. And we are about to see a lot more of that sort of thing with ARM servers, arm laptops, arm netbooks, home servers etc. Thinking of it as a 'mobile phone/embedded' arch is already behind the times.

There is already loads of ARM kit out there which is 'a real computer' and there is no reason why you shouldn't change the OS if you want to (although you may not have a very wide choice of non-linux OSes in practice).

To me 'embedded' was when you had 8K of RAM and 4 IO wires to play with - these days microcontrollers are much bigger than that and anything that can run linux has enormous resources in comparison.

[Disclosure: I've been working on arm kit since 1993 and am currently working for Linaro at ARM].