As was stated earlier, FreeBSD (or I'll add netbsd as well) certainly is a full fledged OS that would allow free redistribution of all the work without having GPL encumbrance, while allowing any sort of "remote telemetry" desired. And it's free free free, if you ignore that developing for it is possibly more time consuming since you'll want to limit your ecosystem to non-GPL code.
Nevertheless, if I were working through a product that involves "redistribution" of any of it, and I really didn't want to deal with any potential issues with compliance with the GNU requirements, I'd spec out that the whole product runs [free|net]BSD and runs only 3rd party apache/bsd/purchased licensed code/libraries. This isn't really even a difficult option.
You'd probably just spend 1/20th of your time looking at hardware BOMs.
Freebsd has pretty good compatibility, and if you're buying in sufficient volumes or making / integrating boards from scratch you can just stick to the paved roads. It may not end up being quite as cheap from a BOM perspective, though.
I was wondering the same. I might be misremembering, but I think early versions of the touch screen used Windows CE, and development on the new touchscreen (the only instance of Linux I’m aware of in John Deere’s ag lineup) started sometime around 2010 (depending on when you measure “started”), so Windows CE was still alive, but maybe there was some writing on the wall that it was being shuttered?
If they want a heavyweight modern OS that someone else maintains and that Deere, and not Microsoft, can control, the only real choice is Linux.