> Of the many recurring stupid ideas for startups I have had is a software company that does not write code. Instead it edits and removes code. This has been called "negative coding."
This is prevalent in the embedded OS market with vendors that sell commercial Linux licenses. Many will take a stable Yocto distribution and strip out unnecessary pieces to reduce its weight to suit customer specifications.
Often times the OS vendor will then have to go in and add code to meet standard/certification requirements set by the customer. They'll also generally have to add certain libraries and snippets of code for hardware/middleware-specific integration.
I'm not an embedded engineer, but from my convos with engineers/execs I have to believe its exceedingly rare that a company could simply strip out pieces from an open source distribution, not add anything proprietary, and sell the resulting code to a customer.
This is prevalent in the embedded OS market with vendors that sell commercial Linux licenses. Many will take a stable Yocto distribution and strip out unnecessary pieces to reduce its weight to suit customer specifications.
Often times the OS vendor will then have to go in and add code to meet standard/certification requirements set by the customer. They'll also generally have to add certain libraries and snippets of code for hardware/middleware-specific integration.
I'm not an embedded engineer, but from my convos with engineers/execs I have to believe its exceedingly rare that a company could simply strip out pieces from an open source distribution, not add anything proprietary, and sell the resulting code to a customer.