Mweston stated that for this reason the
gerber files will not be published. From hardware perspective the hardest work is to make a decent layout (together with using decent parts of course) that is stable and works.
So, while they might be able to
copy the idea, they can't
duplicate this without a lot of effort.
An other factor is that the production process (it uses very small parts) is pretty advanced, not something
any cheap MP3 maker can do - note that i'm
not saying that
NO Chinese maker could do it, but it's not common yet.
One thing that could more "easily" (take this with a lot of salt) be done is making a
compatible device, using bigger form factor or so, assuming they can get their hands on the chips from TI - which for the moment I doubt.
For the "open" part this is what been promised:
* hardware: information on every connection available and no obscuring on what chips are used. aka , you can "hack in" the system on hardware level because you know what each thing is supposed to be/do.
* software: no restriction on what OS you can run and information about the boot process. aka, you are free to run whatever OS you fancy, assuming you can code/port/compile it for this platform yourself or have some people do it for you.....
The license of the OS is in fact irrelevant, just because you can choose what os to run (unlike for example Iphone where Apple does it's best to make it impossible to run anything besides their "OSX for Iphone"), if that happen to be a GPL (or similar) system, then fine. But if someone would want to make a closed source OS for the pandora then that's also fine. If you happen to have the source code of windows laying around then theoretically you could even port this (of course it would be illegal and a major task to get that stuff ported to arm - but just saying to make a point here).
