Open Source & Embedded

Embedded Geek writes "Jack Ganssle has posted a column at embedded.com pondering whether Red Hat and other open source companies serving the embedded community are due a shakeout similar to the dot com collapse. He cites Red Hat's March cuts in their embedded division and their losses of $80M to $140M a year. He admits, though, that because the embedded market is smaller and many companies are privately held it is difficult to get a pulse on what's going on behind closed doors. "

Comments

Open Source is Not A Business

[Bruce Perens]

Sure, a number of companies will shake out. Some people blame this on the Open Source nature of the software, but they are really missing the point. Open Source is not a business, it's a cost-center that is shared among a large number of collaborators. A cost-center is less than half of your business plan. Open Source is non-differentiating for your business, because everybody else can offer the same thing, and thus the best plan a business can have for it is to use it to reduce cost so that they can spend more on their differentiators and profit centers.

In making a business plan, you will need to figure out what your differentiators and profit centers will be. It's obviously not going to be software sales - the folks who tried a royalty-based embedded system based on Linux went out of business faster, because they had free competition. In general it will be consulting services, and this is going to be a difficult business in a slow economy as businesses will try to do more with their own engineers. Businesses also have an incentive to use their own engineers for embedded work, as they don't want to be in the situation of losing the recipie for one of their own products. That can happen more easily when an outside vendor does the work.

I created the user-mode half of most Linux embedded systems - a program called busybox. It's everywhere. I used the GPL. Because of that decision, the person who put the most effort into maintaining that program, after me, is still working on it and is able to offer his consulting services on it. Had I not used the GPL, he would have had to give it up when his previous employer was one of those shaken out. I have a lot more sympathy for him than the employer. Also, had I used a license other than the GPL, the program would not have become an open standard for embedded - everyone would have been making their own proprietary additions rather than cooperating. And I didn't care that companies could not lock in a revenue capture on busybox - why should I?

I think Debian has the best "business plan" of any Linux distribution: don't even try to make money. The people who use Debian as a cost center (HP, for example) pay for its development, and they are very clear about what their profit centers are. This is why I think Debian will eventually end up on top.

Bruce