[TriEmbed] Anybody doing offline builds of mbed?

[Pete Soper]

Speaking of focus, I'd love to be able to just use the mbed runtime/rtos 
environment, overcome or route around its warts and leverage the fact 
that it has an Apache license and appears to support a broad range of 
low power ARM chips.

To this end I'm curious if anybody is building/using mbed with gcc and 
friends? That is, building it "offline"? Am I silly to use mbed, because 
it's just a ploy to make me realize I can't go down that road very far 
before coughing up a kilobuck or two and sending it to Keil (a division 
of ARM, which is behind mbed)?

But also, is mbed OK, say for its best-supported dev board, or is it a 
chaotic mess of unqualified source code mutations that is not 
converging? Can folks just put back changes to the mbed source without 
any determination about how much it might hose things up? What's the 
best list or forum to hang out on to develop perspective about mbed 
(e.g. how its rtos rates) so I don't jump to conclusions based on a tiny 
number of samples?

-Pete