Linksys were "forced" to release the GPL source after they were outed by people discovering (IIRC) busybox strings embedded in their firmware. (It was one of those situations where the vendor was basically told "you can do the right thing, or we can go to court and stop you distributing your product -- why not do the right thing?".) IIRC it was resolved pretty soon after Cisco bought them, by "doing the right thing" (although certain parts are still binary-only, such as the driver for the wireless interface); and their "firmware vendor" was blamed for the use. They do seem to have been pretty good about releasing the source promptly now, but I get the impression it's out of license obligation rather than a desire for modable hardware, and they don't exactly go out of their way to make modifications easy.
It's interesting reading through the current hardware compatibility list for OpenWRT (http://openwrt.org/TableOfHardware) to see just how many of these consumer products are running Linux internally, with basically the same hardware in them. I've not really followed the others much, so I'm not sure if any of the other manufacturers are more open-source friendly. But I'm not sure I'd buy any of them for "supporting open source", since my impression is that they're just using Linux because it was there and the price was right. (There are other hardware vendors which are more keen on open source in other areas though.)
As for the cables, my impression is that (again for short runs) the quality of cable makes relatively little difference, but keeping the signals separate (component) definitely helps a lot. In my case I'm actually using an A-V cable (intended for composite + left/right audio) for my component cable -- it's only a couple of feet long, and it works fine. In theory component video should be a little better quality than S-Video (since the cables are more physically separate), but as I said the difference is much less than the gap to composite. And you're right component video is generally easier to get hold of/plug in.
no subject
It's interesting reading through the current hardware compatibility list for OpenWRT (http://openwrt.org/TableOfHardware) to see just how many of these consumer products are running Linux internally, with basically the same hardware in them. I've not really followed the others much, so I'm not sure if any of the other manufacturers are more open-source friendly. But I'm not sure I'd buy any of them for "supporting open source", since my impression is that they're just using Linux because it was there and the price was right. (There are other hardware vendors which are more keen on open source in other areas though.)
As for the cables, my impression is that (again for short runs) the quality of cable makes relatively little difference, but keeping the signals separate (component) definitely helps a lot. In my case I'm actually using an A-V cable (intended for composite + left/right audio) for my component cable -- it's only a couple of feet long, and it works fine. In theory component video should be a little better quality than S-Video (since the cables are more physically separate), but as I said the difference is much less than the gap to composite. And you're right component video is generally easier to get hold of/plug in.
Ewen