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Embedded Linux Journal Ceases Print Publication
Anonymous Coward writes "SSC Publications (the publisher of Linux Journal) today announced that the May/June 2002 issue will be the final stand-alone print edition of Embedded Linux Journal (ELJ). Future ELJ content will now be "embedded" into Linux Journal, as a monthly feature section. ELJ's website, ELJonline, will continue to regularly feature new embedded Linux articles, reviews, news, and contests."
Former roommate Don Marti (also the former Editor for ELJ) told me that "Desktop Linux has learned a lot from Embedded Linux and Vice-Versa, you can expect Linux Journal to pick up where ELJ left off, and continue pushing linux on embedded platforms. Picking Linux as your embedded OS means you don't have to compromise in functionality, tools or community support, which means Linux on embedded will always be your best choice. If you are doing any embedded development at all, read linux journal and rejoice! as the pain of developing on proprietary embedded OSes has passed."
This is a first post. Get it in ya.
- The AC Avenger.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAH! who farted?
Really, come on.
Maybe five guys in the world give a shit about this .
--
pants ahoy
I swear it.
Did they really think a stand-alone magazine on such a rare thing would sell? ;)
You don't need to be Kreskin to see that Embedded Linux is not dying.
Hell, just about all the C/C++ magazines went out of business as well. It basically means that readers are eschewing print magazines for online magazines.
Although I'd be quite upset if DDJ went out of business. It makes some of the best toilet reading material, not to mention the ads that are great for wiping in a pinch.
I have been pwned because my
It was a really good journal, and you couldn't beat the price (my company got in for the free issues).
We knew it was going away some time ago, so I've been braced, and while Linux Journal is a fairly good journal, it was nice to pick up something that was made by those in the same field as me and have an entire journal that talked about things that were very relevant to what i was professionally doing. Every month they had something that was interesting, up to date, and explained alot of what was going on in the Embedded Linux world.
We'll miss you!
come now.
you're being silly.
--
pants ahoy
As I was going to purchase my subscription to ELJ, I saw that they were no longer taking any orders. Confused, I decided to visit /. for a while... if only I could have registered more quickly... then there would still be an ELJ! Damn you slow typing! Damn you to Hell!
--Kevin
Relatively few people are buying commercial embedded Linux distros, so these companies are going under (e.g Lineo). There's a lot of press, picking up on this trend, implying that embedded Linux is dead.
However, the fact that engineers don't need to buy expensive support to get their embedded open source OSes to run is really a positive sign for embedded Linux, despite the cries that it may be dead.
eljonline has Browser lock-in enabled. It appears that one cannot simply back out of a page. Hmm...
Bad eljonline!
I have been pwned because my
Oatmeal tastes like ass. I know this because I eat ass.
i can't say that i was surprised when i got the email saying that ELJ was going out of print. I never asked for, or paid for a subscription to ELJ. My job has never involved working with embedded linux. Yet for no apparent reason, they felt the need to send me a glossy magazine every month.
I have now found the one topic that I care the least about, in the entire history of my life.
Those bastards pawned off a one year subscription I had to fucking WIRED magazine, they TOOK MY FUCKING MONEY!
...but seems you ought to be able to work a tail in there somewhere :-)
Interesting that there was an embedded Linux magazine - are there any for that much better OS, Windows XP Embedded?
And bucking the trend, slashdot today announced it would begin to publish a newstand edition of its "News for Gnurds, Stuff that Matters" site. For a premium, a phone-book-sized "full" edition is also available that includes comments rated at -1, exposing the real dirt in the computer community.
Poor ELJ. They got "Perl Journal"-ed! :-(
(note what happens when you visit tpj.com...)
I'm torn between making a joke about how untechie and backwards print media is or how linux users are fat, cheap, dorky slobs.
Couldn't even get it on the selves here in Australia!
Don Marti .... the former Editor for ELJ told me that..."If you are doing any embedded development at all, read linux journal and rejoice! as the pain of developing on proprietary embedded OSes has past."
passed. No wonder he's the former editor...
I am waiting for these companies to get smart and start sending our the mags on CD's. The ability to have a search engine and a true cross-referencing would be nice. Finally, CDs are cheaper than dead-tree press to produce. One last thing for all the idiot editors out there. You can include all sorts of stuff on 3/4 g that you can not even get close on dead trees.
I've seen inside LJ. ELJ was being done by the same (already busy) staff as LJ without any extra help. The magazine business is tough, and between that and some management issues I'm surprised ELJ lasted as long as it did. It's too bad but hey, live to fight another day.
I was reading an article last week in EE Times about an apparent attitude shift in the embedded linux area. The article claimed that enthusiasm is dying.
EE Times interviewed Lineo's CEO who said: "We assumed in 1999 that the market would pay for embedded Linux the same way it pays for VxWorks. But we've learned that a model built on extracting revenue from nothing more than Linux is doomed to failure," Harris told EE Times."
I know there are people out there still using/planing to use embedded Linux but I can't help but wonder what the future really holds. Most Linux development is after all in the desktop/server markets.
Another interesting quote:
At the recent Embedded Systems Conference, Wind River chairman of the board and co-founder Jerry Fiddler told EE Times that the company no longer considers Linux to be a strong presence in the embedded market. "Linux is a phantasm," he said. "Software isn't free, and companies are beginning to realize that."
If anyone knows the embedded arena, it's Wind River.
Give away cars for free and sell car-cleaning.
It is early in the a.m. and I am obviosly not thinking straight. sorry. take away amazon.
The only ELJ I ever got was bundled in a plastic bag "promotion" with a Linux Journal. I liked it, alot, and have always been on the lookout for it on the newstand at Barnes & Nobles. I've never, ever seen it. I guess that that issue was a "test" run to see if there was a market. I certainly would have bought it regularly (like I do LJ and LM) had it been available. I know that's not ELJ's fault (I probably could've requested it), but I certainly never saw any advertising for the magazine, either.
Oh well.
On another note, is The Perl Journal back in publication?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
How? Well, like it or not, Embeded Linux is kind of a specific market...
Think about who their major customers would be...Embeded Systems developers. And that's the problem, if it's anything worthwhile, it won't be of any help for your specific project. And if you're doing development, you're more likely to find more helpful information online or in a good book.
Oh, yes...they can do a cute writeup on the Tivo or Netpliance hack, but once it's all said an done, it's a niche that doesn't really need its own publication.
One group that this happened with is the Amiga community. At one point in time, there were Amiga Video, Amiga 3D, Amiga Sound, Amiga Power User, Amiga Games, and General Amiga mags.
At some point someone in all of the smaller (niche) magazines decided to merge their content with the much larger, higher circulation General Amiga mags. What you got in the end was a little bit of everything and what tended to be the best of the best...
So, maybe this will just make all of the Linux mags converge into a much better publication that all users can find useful all of the time, instead of a few users finding it useful some of the time.
Help me nail this coffin shut. HAHAHA
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Embedded Linux community when recently SSC Publications confirmed that Embedded Linux accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all linux usage. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Embedded Linux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Embedded Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Embedded Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Embedded Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Embedded Linux because Embedded Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Embedded Linux. As many of us are already aware, Embedded Linux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Red Hat is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. Slackware leader Patrick Volkerdingstates that there are 7000 users of Slackware . How many users of Mandrake are there? Let's see. The number of Slackware versus Mandrake posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Mandrake users. Embedded Linux posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Slackware posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Embedded Linux. A recent article put Embedded Linuxat about 80 percent of the Embedded Linux market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of Embedded Linux Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of SSC Publications, abysmal sales and so on, Embedded Linux went out of business and was taken over by Embedded Linux who sell another troubled OS. Now SSC Publicationsis also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that Embedded Linux has steadily declined in market share. Embedded Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Embedded Linux is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Embedded Linux continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Embedded Linux is dead. Fact: Embedded Linux is dead
I have never bought ELJ but it is a pity its is going - not least because it means the quality of material online will suffer too (as there will be .
It's great being in a community and all, but the lack of commercial discipline does mean some online documentation is a little on the ropey side.
If you print rubbish in a magazine then nobody buys it. If you put it in an online site i's just a mistake.
Let's face it, the evidence is overwhelming. Have you checked out RHAT stock prices or the ever growing list of *linux companies gone out of business. Now even the press is abandoning *linux. Linux is truly dying.
I used to be a LJ subscriber in the UK until they announced ELJ as a US-only free publication.
Refusing to subsidise a "free" region-coded rag to which I was not entitled, I simply cancelled my subscription to LJ altogether.
Job done!
It should be noted that the SSC in SSC Publications could stand for " Short, Shameful Confession".
First, my C.V.:
I've been a professional embedded software designer since 1987. My current project has 4 DSPs and one main processor. I have several projects out on the market (I have several more, but I got tired of pasting Google links). I run the gaumit from DSP algorithms to systems design to UI design to OS work.
OK, on to my point:
There's two ways to look at Embedded Linux. The first is to look at how much money is being made by companies selling Embedded Linux services - comparing Lineo with Wind River. By this standard, Embedded Linux isn't doing very well, because few companies are making a killing selling Embedded Linux tools. The second way is to look at design wins - how many projects are having Linux built into them. This gets tricker: how do you build up a list of design wins? For a commercial product like VxWorks, you just ask Wind River "How many new licensees of VxWorks were there this year?" But you cannot do that with Linux - as has been noted elsewhere most folks going to Embedded Linux just pull down RedHat, Debian or some other distro and run from there.
Now, let me shed some perspective on this. Embedded systems come in all sizes, from your smart themostat to telecom systems. If you are design a small device, with no display (or a very simple display), no network connectivity, and very small amounts of RAM and ROM, you don't want to use Linux - it's overkill. But, if you do the kind of stuff I do, where you have GUIs, gigabytes of disc storage, network stacks, printer support, scripting, and so on, you DON'T want to use something like VxWorks - they didn't have a DHCP client in their earlier version, they didn't have DNS, they don't have very good printer support, forget SMB (save if you wish to pretend to BE a printer), the only GUI they really support is Java on a frame buffer. Also, their hardware support is pretty lame - if you deviate just a little bit from the supported boards they have, you can kiss good support goodbye (their X-Scale ports don't activate the on-chip cache - farewell to half your CPU speed).
But would I go to Lineo for their package? No, not because of any intrisic failing of Lineo, but because I don't NEED to, and by the time I clear the crap with our Contracts person, I'm slipping schedule.
Believe me - I see the FUD in all my trade journals. The problem it they are geared to deal with the likes of Wind River, and they don't know how to measure something that can be downloaded free. Furthurmore, Debian doesn't buy ad space in EE Times, so it's hard for EE Times to get excited about them.
www.eFax.com are spammers
TPJ
My sig sucks.
First, since they only seem to have given it away, how on earth were they planning to stay in business long-term? The other major problem was that their content was never terribly impressive. A large percentage of articles was devoted to product roundups and descriptions, and showcasing embedded Linux projects of various companies. Unfortunately these showcases were more of the look-what-cool-stuff-we-did-aren't-we-great variety, rather that providing lots of truly helpful information and how-tos for someone wanting to do the same. Frankly, I've gotten MUCH more useful articles on Linux embedding and programming from Circuit Cellar (Ingo Cyliax is bloody amazing) that from ELJ.
Embedded Linux Journal was one of the absolute best Mag's out there, coupled with Circuit Cellar the two made what technical magazines are supposed to be. I stopped my LJ subscription years ago when I exceeded what it's content could give me, ELJ was awesome with articles like "creating an embedded linux system from scratch" that covered topics like keeping everything small including your libs.
That publication is going to be missed... i would have paid twice the Linux Journal price for it, same as i would have paid dearly for the Perl Journal if it wasnt bastardized by the companies that bought it. It seems that the truely technical publications are dying, and only the newbie,gooey,fluffy publications are all that's left.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've seen a number of books on the kernel internals for Linux 2.2 but I was wondering if anyone's seen any specifically dealing with kernel 2.4. I don't mean "what's coming in 2.4" at the end of the chapter, but 2.4 as a core study.
I want to start some embedded Linux/uClinux hacking but I don't want to spend a lot of time learning the internals of 2.2 only to relearn core parts (vm, networking, vfs, etc.) for 2.4.
Embedded Linux
No longer a magazine
Now a mere column
The BSD license is simple and easy to understand.
The GPL that infects *linux introduces the RISK (although manageable) that you will have to release your code.
Why open yourself to potential legal action by using Linux?