Linux Now Top Choice Of Embedded Developers

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at LinuxDevices.com, the latest market research data from Venture Development Corp. shows that Linux is now firmly in first place as the OS of choice for smart gadgets and embedded systems. VDC's latest data indicates that Linux now accounts for 15.5% of embedded projects, beating out Microsoft's WinCE (6%) and XPe (5%), and Wind River's VxWorks (10.3%)."

Comments

An Important and Often Overlooked Front

[Dominatus]

Linux success is almost always measured in the desktop and/or server markets, and very rarely in the embedded market. It's refreshing to see an article showing the strength on Linux in a market that has a lot of potential but little of the glamour.

Makes a lot of sense to me

[JavaRob]

Putting an OS on a small device is a task that tends to require a lot of tweaking... when you're making it small, you tend to make a lot of compromises, and small devices tend to be much more diverse than personal computers and servers (well, duh).

So -- what OS is better suited to this kind of application? The open source one with plenty of developers out there, tweaking it as we speak, where the developers of your hardware can be shaping the embedded OS as they build the prototype? ...Or the one written and managed by a single company who, yes, has talented developers, but none of whom are on-site working with you?

Not that I'm the only one saying this, of course, but this is a great chance for the Linux model to shine.

Re:Makes a lot of sense to me

[proj_2501]

Or the one written and managed by a single company who, yes, has talented developers, but none of whom are on-site working with you?

I can see you've never had a customer responsible for 50% of your revenue before :) Pay enough money and you get a developer on site.

the GPL is a mine field.

[Roman_(ajvvs)]

I work at a manufacturing company, and by chance we spent half of last week researching development issues under different OS's. Currently we use a variety of Microsoft OS's in our systems and we want to keep our options as open as possible.

There are as yet unresolved issues with the use of binary software with GPL software in general and linux specifically, despite linus' assurances that userspace code doesn't require GPL license compatibility and that he won't enforce that section of the GPL. Linus is using the GPL license as written by the FSF, albeit fixed to V.2 and with some specific modifications. They (linus and the FSF) disagree on on the details of whether or not using GPL-licensed header files forces the software using them to be be under a GPL-compatible license. Even linus admits there are grey areas and his interpretation has been debated. Until this matter is resolved definitively (probably in court), I don't want to place my company at risk of being forced to release code that we do not want to release, simply because we compiled our software for linux.

What we found, is that the GPL, LGPL and other FSF licenses are very problematic when dealing with the control of code(proprietry or otherwise). The GPL licensing terms are very strict and dangerous in terms of source code-ownership vs binary code-distribution and legal obligations.
The FSF cannot of course, enforce the GPL for software they don't own the copyright for. However, the licensing conditions and restrictions of the GPL automatically come into effect without much influence from the actual copyright holders. We're left to the whims of copyright owners and their good word to decide what is considered a breach and what is 'tolerated'. As we see more GPL software being used by companies with proprietry code, I think we'll see a nasty side of the GPL rear its head as enforcement starts to kick in from different areas. Boundaries of legality are constantly tested, when they are wide and filled with grey.
Just because you don't get charged with doing something illegally as you do it, that doesn't mean that you can't get prosecuted afterwards, if someone feels like going after you.

Re:the GPL is a mine field.

[ADRA]

If you've read ANYTHING about the SCO case, its that you can't hand out API's (erm LSB) and then turn around and sue anyone for using that interface (regardless of the distribution license). Imagine the anti-trust lawsuits of MS sueing a competitor xyz for implementing private API function xyz which makes the program twice as fast while implementing it themselves.

There is also discussion that it may be impossible to enforce copyright's for API's at all. Under fair-use laws, I believe that anyone can have the right to implement the API as long as its been released to the public in one form or the other. I can't remember all the details, but it was something along those lines.

The only cases that I've really seen developers going after vendors is when they take GPL copyrighted code lock stock and barrel and put it in their own systems without credit, source, or some other blatently obvious GPL violation (Netfilter, etc..).

Re:Grr...

[Spoing]

1. And yet, if I went out to try and buy a mobile phone which runs Linux for the geek value, I wouldn't be able to find one. Maybe it's in the wrong embedded markets...

OTOH most of the mini routers for wireless/cable/DSL use are Linux based.

I'd expect that depending on what category of device you look at, there could be an entirely different embeded OS that is most popular if not just more popular than Linux.

Not nearly that bad

[r6144]

It seems to me that the topology.org article is so opinionated that it is mostly flamebait.

As for the parent itself, I think the real problem is not nearly as serious as the parent makes it out to be (IANAL). Of course, you may have legal difficulties if you want to make binary-only kernel modifications or kernel modules, but user-space programs should be completely unaffected since they only access the kernel via system calls, thus covered by the exception in the kernel license (since it is in the license, the developers probably agree with Linus, whatever the court thinks). Therefore, in most cases you can just put your proprietary bits into user space and only the kernel modules/modifications must be released in source form. Well, if you put everything inside the kernel itself and still want to keep things proprietary, you probably do not have much chance since this is probably a derivative work by any interpretation (especially if you don't use modules), but the kernel license had never been designed to allow for such use anyway.

Actually I do think the FSF interpretation of derivative work is too wide. They may have a good intention, but I don't think it is practical to make a program a derivative work simply by linking to a C shared library --- the resulting executable often does not contain anything substantial that is related to the library (mostly just structure offsets and maybe versioning attributes about referenced symbols)! This creates much uncertainty, and if the court disagrees with this, it would be very painful for companies like MySQL AB that more or less rely on this. I think the GPL should have limited its version of "derivative work" to things that are clearly derivative works by the court's interpretation, such as those containing substantial amounts of data (source code, binary code or otherwise) that comes from the library, and LGPL should not have existed, GPL-with-linking-exception should only be meaningful for libraries that are usually statically linked. The FSF is IMHO too ambitious ("we want to create an advantage for free software since only them can link to libreadline!") in this case, and it seems to be too late to change now.

Re:Are mobile phones not embedded devices?

[ADRA]

"Linux now accounts for 15.5 percent of embedded projects"

In other words, more development projects are using Linux over other embedded OS's. So, Symbian may be running on 50% of all embedded devices in the world, but if only a select few comanies are using it, they're just regurgiting the same old thing. There may be 50 seperate symbian projects stemming from Nokia alone, but that wouldn't begin to dent the market share that Linux is forming.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. Symbian was designed for mobile phones, and basically little else. You look at the number of projects in Cell phones vs. the entire Embedded spectrum (which linux more or less competes) and you realize why Linux has such a market share when it comes to who it developing them.

Of course the stats are flawed as usual. You could say Linux has a 15% developer mind-share, but if they only account for 1% of all embedded 'sales', or 'revenue', that's really not that impressive at all.

15% of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify the statistic so we are talking about the right thing, since the actual posting and the LinuxDevices articles seemed pretty vague to me. ("Linux is 15%! Windows is 6%. Yay!")

About 27,000 developers on their mailing list (which targetted embedded developers) were given web-based questionnaires to answer. This figure is for "what OS are you using for your current project" and the statistic is counted by percentage of answers.

Chart here.

More info at VDC's website.

Ok, now back to the regularly scheduled programming...

Re:The reason is simple,...

[crisco]

I think the obvious conclusion is that you are a better Python / Web developer than your girlfriend is a PocketPC.NET developer.