The other day I noticed a menu option on the iPod Touch called “Legal”. Normally, I avoid reading such legal notes, but this time I was curious to see what was mentioned here. Well, a lot was mentioned. It took me 76 “scroll-the-page-down” strokes to reach the bottom of the long list of legal speak. Most interesting fact; more than 3/4 of the notes were open source related! I saw the GPL come by several times for instance.

Anyone dare to estimate how much total effort it took to develop all the software shipped with the iPod Touch, including the effort put into the open source software? Are your SOCs and video subsystems ready to support open source software?