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Red Hat And Lineo Respond To MS Embedded Linux FUD

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-now-brown-cow dept.

jeffy124 writes: "Red Hat and Lineo, the major spearheads of Embedded Linux, have said that Microsoft's recent white paper comparing Linux and Windows XP embedded is full of inaccuracies, false facts, and overall distorts the value of Linux in general. Lineo has gone as far to say it flat out lies about Linux. ZDNet has Lineo's response, Red Hat comments, and a summary article." Updated by HeUnique: LynuxWorks has also wrote a response (only this one is a bit more detailed).

2 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. But sometimes there ARE better alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant
    I used to work closely with a development team that made the transition from a proprietary (and, may I add, unmaintainable and unreliable) embedded OS to Linux. Though some of the concerns in the article did come up, especially speed and size issues, those didn't hurt us much. After all, we could afford a better processor and more memory with the money we saved on royalties and maintenance expenses - these were substantial.

    Unfortunately, if the many features of Linux and the transition from assembler to C didn't hurt us, the licensing did. Things went very smoothly until we needed to make some big changes to the kernel to accomodate a newer version of our hardware. At that point, there was a schism in the group: some of the developers wanted to change the kernel and release the product without source (the "who would find out?" crowd) and the rest of us knew that Linux was not going to fit our needs anymore unless we wanted to give our work away to competitors.

    Well, the "who would find out?" crowd won the first round, and because of release deadlines we "slipped" the kernel changes into the next version of the product. And nobody knew. Except one of us told the legal department about what happened and they became very agitated.

    Now our software runs on embedded NetBSD. It wasn't quite as robust as embedded Linux but it works well and we really can't complain. Transitioning to a new OS took a lot of effort but it was a necessary evil. After all, we couldn't risk getting sued out of existence to save a little money.

    But the question I draw from this is: why not relax the GPL restrictions a bit for embedded applications? It seems like this area of the market will never be dominated by Linux until companies can stop fretting about licensing problems and start concentrating on coding instead.

    -e.t.

    1. Re:But sometimes there ARE better alternatives by nathanh · · Score: 1, Redundant

      Deja Vu. The parent post has been seen on /. before: it's word for word the same. I suspect a canned troll.