TRON Enters Alliance With Microsoft

David writes "As widely reported on OSNews.com, Forbes, IDG, CNet, AustralianIT, and Ashi Shimbun - Microsoft Corp. has entered into an alliance with the T-engine Forum, the consortium behind the free software TRON operating system. As TRON runs billions of devices worldwide, this will help Microsoft's goal of cementing WinCE / .NET in places as diverse as your toaster and cell phone, perhaps in a setup similar to how X-Windows is in relation to the Linux kernel." (Continued below.)

David continues: "This arrangement is ironic, as Microsoft is part of the reason why the U.S. in the 1980s prevented Japan from putting TRON into schools on the desktop by account of trade rules, which would've meant Linux may've never gone beyond being a footnote in the comp.os.minix archives. No doubt Microsoft is aiming to keep Linux out of the embedded space, and may in the long-term foster an environment where using anything other than industry-licenced OS software on the desktop becomes unviable for everyday tasks because all the infratructurial systems we take for granted today like radio, television, phones, IM, require Palladium-style walled gardens."

Comments

Window CE is just one of the middlewares for TE

[pario]

Everyone here seems to have missed the main point. This alliance only means that Microsoft will create a version of Windows CE .NET that runs on the T-Engine platform. T-Engine is a collection of standards for embedded hardware, realtime operating system and middlewares, and for the T-Engine platform Windows CE .NET will be just one of the middlewares. This news is not even about Microsoft taking over TRON or MS vs Java; in fact, there are T-Java and T-Linux under development, by Sun and Montavista, respectively, and other GUI middlewares on sale, which were originally part of BTRON, the TRON desktop OS. Most information about T-Engine is available only in Japanese at this point, but you can find some in English here.

As a sidenote, the main thrust of the T-Engine platform is high portabilty of middlewares across various embedded emvironments with different CPUs. This portabilty is made possible by a standard opensource kernel, which is based on micro-ITRON 3.0, and standalization of hardware. Dr. Sakamura even said he is going to fix the specification of the realtime kernel by the end of year and it will not be changed for the next HUNDRED years for the sake of comatibilty of middlewares. Moreover, there are rumors that a subsidary of Panasonic is developing a desktop operating system based on T-Engine. This is a very exciting year for the TRON project indeed.