Linux competition heating up.
upside.com
Lineo, LynuxWorks face off in embedded market
By Sam Williams
June 29, 2000
Perhaps as proof that you can find good coffee in Utah, Embedded
Linux player Lineo Inc. made a single-handed attempt to corner the
embedded Linux news market Monday, releasing no less than five major
corporate announcements.
In addition to announcing that its flagship Embedix distribution now
supports ARM cores and high availability clustering, the Linden,
Utah.-based company unveiled a new open source project website,
opensource.lineo.com.
The site offers links to open source projects maintained or created by
Lineo employees. Projects on the page include uCLinux, an attempt to
customize embedded Linux for the microcontroller market; and
BusyBox, a collection of lightweight Unix utilities for the entire embedded
software market.
According to Lineo chief technical officer Tim Bird, the company wanted
a central resource to exhibit its employees' open source contributions to
the world and to internal management.
"We've acquired several companies over the last six months, and we
didn't have any consistent way to make that information available," Bird
says.
Although Bird says the site will feature a number of free services,
including an automated mailing list program, Web-based CVS -- i.e.
source code tree -- access, Bird says the company has no interest in
setting itself up as an embedded Linux version of SourceForge, the
popular VA Linux (LNUX)-owned project portal site. If anything, he
says, the site was inspired by similar pages on the Corel (CORL) and
SGI (SGI) corporate websites.
"Part of it is a maintenance issue on our side," he says. "This helps us
consolidate and manage things uniformly. We're not trying to be the
be-all and end-all site."
As for the flurry of news announcements rolling out this week: On
Tuesday the company announced the release of Golden Gate, a set of
compatibility libraries built to ensure application portability from Wind
River's VxWorks and other "legacy" real time operating systems -- Bird
again cited the company's fast growth track over the last six months.
"Part of it comes from having acquired all these different companies," he
says. "It's actually been quite a challenge to judge the communication
needs of all these different groups.
"Basically, we just have a lot of stuff going on."
LynuxWorks steps into the ondeck circle
Another reason behind the sudden flurry of activity might be the recent
announcement that Lineo competitor LynuxWorks has joined the race
to become the first embedded Linux IPO.
LynuxWorks, makers of both the proprietary LynxOS and the newer
Blue Cat Linux distribution, a modified version of Red Hat (RHAT) 6.1,
announced the completion of a $35 million secondary funding round June
19. The announcement comes eight weeks after Lineo announced its
own $37 million secondary funding round. Lineo has since filed for an
IPO.
Investors in last week's LynuxWorld funding round include Sun Venture
Capital Partners, Dain Rauscher Wessels Venture Partners and
five other VC firms.
The San Jose-based company formerly known as Lynx Real Time
Systems Inc. changed its name to LynuxWorks in early May to reflect
the company's growing strategic investment in the embedded Linux
platform.
Even before then, however, the company had been pouring the proceeds
of a $20 million first round from the likes of Motorola (MOT) and
TurboLinux into a media campaign to build up the BlueCat brand name.
The campaign included a series of billboard advertisements strategically
-- and not so strategically -- placed throughout the San Francisco Bay
Area.
LynuxWorks executives were unable to comment on the funding round.
Headed by embedded software luminary Inder Singh, Lynx has been a
leading player in the embedded software market for more than a decade.
After years of trailing behind market leader Wind River Systems
(WIND), however, the company began repositioning itself as an
embedded Linux player late last year. In January, the company unveiled
Blue Cat, a lightweight version of Linux modified for the low-overhead
embedded systems market.
On Monday, BlueCat popped its head up again, earning an "Electron
d'Or" award from French electronics magazine Electronique. The
award, given to "the most significant development in embedded tools and
software," is based on a poll of software users.
Sam Williams is a freelance writer covering open-source software
and high-tech culture. |
