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To: om3 who wrote (16893)	2/2/2000 12:56:00 PM
From: dwayanu	Respond to of 54805

Wind River, Linux, and eCos Steve: Linux ... suitable for set-top boxes (eg. Tivo), specialized servers (eg. Cobalt), internet appliances, and their ilk. That's a big range of things. I would hold that any general purpose OS like Linux will always have difficulty competing in a technical sense with more specialized OS's like VxWorks (or eCos for that matter) when the target is specialized -- 'specialized' being the essence of the term 'internet appliance'. Tacking a RT piece onto Linux just won't cut it. I do think there is a large OS potential that might be filled by someone someday, for modestly complex devices with internet connectivity such as cell phones/PDAs/internet media tablets/game consoles/TV set-top boxes/etc. Currently, the OS's are extremely fragmented, and the OS owners want to keep it that way because they remember Microsoft. Wannabe OS's are legion, Microsoft, Java, BEOS, Palm OS, Linux, etc. ... have you looked at eCos( cygnus.com )? My guess is that they are much more of a threat to Wind River than Linux. I don't see it (being a serious threat, that is). The product is immature, developing the product to maturity will take years as Cygnus is trying to do it on the cheap, and the 'royalty-free' business model will never return sufficient revenue to justify expensive in-house-at-Cygnus development. I'm not aware that eCos has any market share at the present. Plus, where does eCos fit into Red Hat's broad business model (whatever that may be, I'm not familiar with its specifics)? The only market I see for eCos is as a substitute for existing in-house RTOS' in those shops where the programmers still have major leverage over technical direction choices. Management type thinking will always opt for predictability and stability over the fun (to people like me) of open source, and modern time-to-market and roadmap/schedule-predictability considerations rule in modern companies that are past the raw startup period. All IMHO, YMMV <g> - Dway