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To: om3 who wrote (16873)	2/1/2000 12:58:00 AM
From: om3	Respond to of 54805

Open source embedded operating systems Just saw this article on Yahoo: yahoo.cnet.com Sounds like Red Hat will be pushing the open source eCos embedded OS they got from Cygnus and that Caldera (who is about to go public) has the wholly-owned subsidiary Lineo which will push its Embedix embedded version of Linux. It's not clear to me how these guys are going to make much money given that their embedded OS's are free but I can certainly see them putting a damper on Wind River's tornado. --Steve

To: om3 who wrote (16873)	2/1/2000 1:05:00 AM
From: dwayanu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Hi om3: re Wind River vulnerable to open source solutions As a long time UNIX programmer, I judge Wind River's vulnerability to Linux as very slight over the next 3 to 5 years. Note that Cygnus, the leading candidate for consolidating the embedded Linux free spirits and harnessing their considerable creative and technical talents, is now owned by Red Hat. Free spirits have a historical reluctance to seeing their work used for commercial purposes. Porting any RTOS to different processors is labor- and talent- intensive, but is an absolute requirement for any RTOS trying to get widespread commercial acceptance. Keeping open source developers focused and coordinated to maintain up to date processor compatibility will be difficult, when the results are not such a grand visible scheme as Linux. The very fact of open source, and no per-unit fees, reduces the commercial viability of any company's Linux RT effort. By the time they get around to commercial-quality products, the Linux market fever will be long over, so they have to IPO now or never, and this is not conducive to creating competitive products. Linux is huge and slow compared to any RTOS. It has a very large feature set from a developer's point of view, but say 90-95% of those features are useless. Tacking a RT module alongside of the existing Linux kernel, the approach taken by the various references you mentioned, is a weak solution at best, historically. Yes, in theory one can take an IBM mainframe, add a couple of parts, and make an atomic clock out of it, but who would want to? Linux/Open Source is a discontinuous innovation which is moving into the functional vacuum left by the gross misdevelopment of UNIX throughout its history on the one hand, and the incompetent Windows/NT systems on the other (IMVHO, of course :-). I see no likelihood that Wind will allow VxWorks et al to create or leave such a vacuum in the RTOS space. That is, I expect Wind to easily win most of the occurrences when in-house companies decide to go outside for their RTOS. The most common reasons IMO for a company to switch from in-house to an outside RTOS are either that the company lost the one or two critical programmers who wrote the RTOS in the first place (and who were the only ones who actually understood the program, and who by nature get bored easily), or that the maintenance/porting of the RTOS for new features and new hardware has grown into a nightmare of bugs and lost time (my current company, it was reason #2 :-). At this point, development management is in pain, and they're going to go with a professional stable product like VxWorks. Developers might well choose the Linux name, but not managers on a schedule. Linux beats the pants off most standard UNIX's for usability and performance and price. But it's highly unsuitable as the basis of a RTOS (except perhaps for raising venture capital). Maybe some charismatic RTOSuru will appear, or maybe some other product/project may appear out of the broad Open Source movement, but I don't see it happening. And remember Microsoft Windows CE <VBG>. - Dway