Are you sitting comfortably? Have you checked under your seat for the license agreement? Did you bring your coat?
ARM came out with a neat little peripheral-packed toy embedded system called the mbed. It costs $59 and has approximately all the IO you could possibly want, including Ethernet. It also has an online compiler, and a clever bootloader that knows how to look like a USB disk, so that you can develop for it even if you use one of those weird free operating systems.
The New York Times was quick to pat them on the back, but the backlash was also quick to appear (I'm particularly amused by the people who seem to be worried that the bootloader software was "licensed and not sold"... just like all of this free software that people seem to like is license and not given away). People's primary objection seemed to be online compiler, but there's instructions for setting up a compiler locally, although then you don't get to use their libraries. I'm not sure I'd want to, to be honest.
I speculate that ARM's bootloader is not open-source because it probably licenses Microsoft's intellectual property in order to provide/read the filesystem for the virtual disk. While I think those patents are a little bit questionable, I can't really blame ARM for not wanting to rock the boat-- and the functionality they provide is still potentially useful to me.
Now I just need to figure out a "thing" that needs to be of the internet...
