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Red Hat Dissolves eCos Team, Changes Embedded Strategy
Anonymous Coward writes "This article at LinuxDevices.com, which includes an Interview with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann, probes Red Hat's dissolution of its eCos project team and the reasoning behind Red Hat's newly adjusted embedded linux strategy. Tiemann says his company is still in the embedded business, but considers embedded to be an aspect of a broader 'platform OS' strategy."
I love how the article draws the line between embedded and _deeply embedded_ real-time systems. [Note the sarcasm: It's vague and left as a one shot deal] Many of the roll-your-own type systems are naturally highly specific, and so the general case fails to apply (or needs serious hacking). This was the reason why Windows XP embedded didn't get nearly as much hype for anything as it did for the concept of a stripped down windows os; A generalized OS isn't really what you need in these type of devices. How often do mission-critical _real time_ systems have extensive virtual memory systems? More often, they try to have enough memory that VM isn't intensive or only used by non-critical processes. http://www.ddj.com/topics/realtime/ for a great series of discussions. (Heavily java oriented, albeit) STILL, saying that _RedHat_ has effectively won out the "embedded linux market" wasn't saying a whole lot; the real market is for stripped down _exceedingly_ generic systems that are designed for extreme platform-specific customization and optimization. But hey, at least we know they wont BSOD. =)
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
If find it amazing how hard Red Hat seem to find the embedded systems industry. Cygnus where around since 1989 providing Open source support for the embedded systems industry. They still have Cygwin...
We need another cool Open source embedded support company to take up the void left by Cygnus...
M0571y H@rml355.
As a long time RTOS programmer, and being a contributor to the ECOS project, I think that this is a terrible blow for the open source community. Is open source (and LGPL) viable? This decision suggests not.
The best thing about open source is that you don't have to rely on an inept customer service person to figure out that they in fact have problems in their system. I've spent weeks asking a large closed source and very expensive RTOS vendor to fix some of the dumbest OS bugs (admittedly in a new JVM product they'd hardly released yet)--they still don't believe the one page test programs I send them; in fact, I've just been simply astounded at the dumb things I've been told to do. There's nothing worse than knowing that if you had the source, you'd just simply fix the problem, submit the change, and move on. And you know what's worst? The development tools for this expensive RTOS were cygnus anyway.
The eCos source code was very well written, it's confiuration understandable (and scriptable!), and all in all, a very well concieved project. I will do a CVS update now; and hang on tight to that system... it will be well worth it.
Most projects I see that use embedded software is in "all in 1 chips" that hold a decent line of I/O, a watchdog (nearly every chip), decent "IPS"/"FLOPS" (whichever one is more needed) rating for job being done and onboard memory.
If your device is fairly simple, you can easily get away from coding the whole thing in the chip ASM and feel comfortable. Anyways, if you need more memory, you have extra address lines.
If something more is required (some sort of a UI), build from the ground up tailoring the whole OS to your hardware. Linux is NOT needed in this type of device. Hoever, it seems viable for palmtops and other small computing environments, as windows seems to take more hardware power to do the same things (though slightly beter).
Neither the GPL nor the LGPL are appropriate for commercial embedded products for precisely the reason you mention.
If you're a hardware manufacturer, opening the source also opens up your proprietary hardware. If you're a software company and you GPL the source, you've just become a support or consulting company. Good luck. Software makes a good complement to hardware, but only if it doesn not commoditize the hardware.
For copyleft to work in the embedded field, we need a new paradigm. Perhaps Trolltech's idea is the way (you can buy a proprietary license to free (as in speech) yourself from the GPL). Perhaps we need a new license that does not require disclosure of source if the software is distributed embedded in the hardware. Perhaps copyleft won't work at all in this field. Just pondering.
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