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

The reason is simple,...

[Maljin Jolt]

...it is by invisible hand of the market. Development costs for embedded on Linux are lower, no matter what FUD about GPL are Microsoft vassals posting on Slashdot. Because embedded incarnations of Linux are very consistent with desktop ones.

An example from real life:

My girlfriend wrote some custom app (database client frontend +some .net stuff) for PocketPC using WinCE emulator in Windows XP. With a real pain, because running emulator took 98% of desktop CPU doing nothing. It was worth a new computer, two months of her work and many grey hairs to complete the task.

I replicated her effort on the identical hardware (HP iPaq, but with Linux flashed in) in three days. The trick I used was a http server running inside iPaq (sic!), calling local python scripts to query remote database and generate html content to local browser.

Guess, from these two implementations, which one is easier and/or cheaper to support?

Can you, Microsoft drones, stuff IIS or any existing COM/DCOM components you already payed for on Win32 into some WinCE device?