Ok, well the reason so many people really favor open source is because its just that, the source is open and you can do what ever you want within the terms of the licensing. With closed source you, 1: don't have the source to work with unless you pay the company much more money than i ever think i will have and 2: i'm thinking it would be copyright infringment to do much more than use it on the device it was made for. I have yet to really look at any hardware specs for the Chumby, but if it turns out the inards are really no/not very different than a pocketpc i'm sure you could do this, but i don't think you will be able to legally get windows ce on this device unless they are extremely similar. I'd love for you to prove me wrong though ^_^

Obviously, we can't condone a project that requires breaking the license for another company's product.

We certainly don't want Microsoft coming down on us, so if this is not consistent with their licensing, I guess our Official Company Position is:

"Please don't do that"

If you obtain the necessary rights to do a port of Windows CE from Microsoft, then we have no problem.

You can't have ported Windows Embedded my friend - Windows NT4 and XP embedded run only on the x86 architechure, and the Chumby is ARM

You could just take a look at reactOS...uses QEMU to run windows processes, but its completely open source. It isn't quite there yet, but take a look!

http://www.reactos.org

Actually, from my testing it takes very few resources and is VERY fast, compared to xp, 98, and all other versions of windoze i have ever used.

OK. Well, it would still be easier than porting windows ce, which is copyrighted, and the source isn't open. ReactOS is open, free, and the liscense wouldn't be broken if someone modded it and ported it to the chumby.

No it can't - Windows CE is available for ARM and x86, and Windows Embedded is x86 only. You don't get source for Windows CE, so unless you are an assembeler GOD (and I mean this, if you can do it, I will fly to wherever you live in the world and bow before your ASM hacking skills, and feel free to hold me to it!) with no wife and kids, and don't have responsibilities, like healing in Naxx/BWL (and you break the law by not using clean-room reverse engineering) there is no practical way of "tailoring" it to any processor.

I joined MSDN, by the way, I've had a subscription since 2001 (I find it's cheaper to get an MSDN subscription for Visual Studio etc. than it is to seperatley purchase all the applications I need for testing software I develop), but I'm still a Windows noob

There is no real need to "port" Windows CE, as such. The only concern to worry about would be driver support, and I don't think this would be much of a problem (and drivers aren't impossible to write, just a little tedious)

The ReactOS bootloader is written in x86 assembeler, as far as I know. My intention was not to bring Windows compatibility to the Chumby, but to use it as a prototyping board for Windows CE applications.

Why port WinCE? Because we can. From what I can see, the Chumby is a very nice peice of hardware, and would make a perfect prototyping board for Windows Embedded applications.

silent_guardian, stop replying to him. he is lying. and he doesnt like chumby anymore. read his website.