The redoubtable Harald Welte recently blogged some thoughts about lack of value contributed back to linux from embedded system vendors:

How many times have you seen some code coming out of a "GPL code release" from one of the many (mostly embedded) vendors that was acutally useful to be contributed back to an existing Free Software project, or even that spawned a new Free Software project? I for my part am certain to say: Zero. The actual number might be close to zero, but very small anyways.

I was thinking about this in the context of my nslu2 box, which just a few days ago passed an important milestone -- full support in the Debian kernel, including a free, rewritten ethernet driver, a fixed RTC, a free boot loader, and hopefully soon, even working LED support. The perfect embedded system.

This is an embedded linux box that started out running a typically awful special-purpose, dead-end linux distro, and which has been rescued to be a general-purpose linux box running a standard linux distro thanks to the work of a great many people. The road from the original firmware to the current system has been long, complex, and hard; you can see glimpses of parts of it here and here.

Here's the thing: This box is a computer designed from the ground up to run linux. Working code was made available by Linksys. As Harald notes, this code was probably "throw-away software", but if the box hadn't been running hacked up Linux in the first place, I dare say we'd not be running stock Debian GNU/Linux on it now. So there is a value in a vendor deciding to use Linux on their embedded system, even if it's only as a proof of concept that it works, as a first step along the long road to doing it right.