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.

With any luck

[shfted!]

With any luck, Linux will soon be ported to run on full fledged x86 desktop computers!

And what about Tron?

[ag0ny]

Last time I checked, TRON was the most used embedded OS. Am I missing something?

That TRON is not an OS?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Rather TRON is the blueprint/design/guide/specs for an OS. Perhaps it is like the OS Unix. No such thing and if you are intrested in nothing showing Unix as having a huge market share then you split it up.

Tron is probably the "other" and "no formal os".

Of course tron is also mostly used in japan, if they didn't count japan then that would also explain it.

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.

[swillden]

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.

IANAL, but as I understand it this isn't true if the someone in question told you that they wouldn't ever go after you. It's called "promissory estoppel".

That doesn't totally clear up all of the questions around Linux, though, since Linus' promises not to sue only apply to the code that is his, which is a small percentage of a modern Linux kernel. However, I've read lawyers argue on Groklaw that the facts that (a) others in the community of kernel developers publicly agree with Linus' stance and (b) no kernel developers publicly disagree with Linus' stance, together provide a good argument for promissory estoppel against suits by any kernel developers, since when those developers decided to contribute, they implicitly agreed to the community consensus as to the meaning of the GPL.

Obviously, you don't want to bet your business without advice from a competent and knowledgeable attorney, but I think there is hope that you can writer userspace Linux apps without fear that you're infringing on the header file copyrights.

It's also worth considering the fact that if you did end up getting sued, you'd be in very good company, since *lots* of companies are doing it (which is the point of the article). That doesn't make a suit less painful, but it probably makes it cheaper, since you can join forces with other defendants to share the costs.

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:the GPL is a mine field.

[10101001 10101001]

I work at a manufacturing company...

Okay, that's an interesting starting point.

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.

What was the link supposed to show again? Modules aren't userland programs. Modules (at least with 2.6.x) have to compile against the kernel source, and that's *clearly* covered under the GPL. The only real question then is whether such use of the kernel code is fair use. Whatever the outcome of that, userland is a wholly separate issue where no linking takes place (headers aren't even needed; you can just use a syscall chart and make your own if you're that paranoid).

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).

That's the whole point, actually. The GPL is designed specifically to remove control from everyone through copyright law.

The GPL licensing terms are very strict and dangerous in terms of source code-ownership vs binary code-distribution and legal obligations.

I'm not sure what your basis is for strictness, but the only restriction the GPL includes is if you use GPL code in your code that if/when you distribute said code as a binary, you provide one of 2 or 3 ways for someone to gain the source under the same terms you got the GPL source. Yes, this is a good deal more restrictive than say the BSD, but at the same time it's a lot *less* restrictive than preventing you from giving out binaries *or* source.

As for "dangerous in terms of source code-ownership", it's not dangerous at all. You own your source code, but you don't have a right to distribute someone else's code except under their provisions. If you don't like it, don't use their code.

We're left to the whims of copyright owners and their good word to decide what is considered a breach and what is 'tolerated'.

You're describing the use of all external software. Look at how SCO is suing IBM over a contract dispute which they bought/inhereted through several generations of companies. If you're that worried about what external copyright owners might do, never use external code; then you just have to worry about being sued because someone external claims you used their code anyways.

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.

"Nasty side"? You mean copyright law? If copyright law didn't exist, there wouldn't be any "nasty side" nor "ownership" nor "enforcement" nor "licenses". Because there exists copyright and the first three are in place to only benefit the original author of a work and no one else, the GPL is designed to counteract all the negative effects of copyright with copyright, through bloody enforcement with lawsuits and all.

It sounds like you're more interested in taking something which you don't own (GPLed works), using it as you please with other works (possibly stuff you licensed from someone else), and you're unhappy that the GPL conflicts with the latter when stuff like BSDed works don't. But, the GPL is all about making things non-proprietary, so no one can claim exclusionary control as fundamentally it's the exclusionary control that is what's causing all your/our problems in the first place.

Linus and others in the "open source" group are pragmatic, though, and realize not everyone is going to change overnight. But, they also realize the best way to guarantee that the Linux kernel behaves well is to have as much information as possible; dumping in binary/closed modules is horribly insecure,

Re:the GPL is a mine field.

[bhima]

I work for a big pharma company, and we reviewed the GPL & BSD licenses, along with many of the points the parent brings up and concluded that software of both licenses is useful to us, the license is compatible with our business model, and it's very easy to not only stay in compliance with GPL & BSD but in most cases cheaper. Of course this is only for Embedded or Machine control projects we still us windows on the desktop.

Anyway I had labeled the parent at best a Microsoft fan or at worst a troll and wasn't going to put the effort you did in refuting him. Bottom line both the GPL and BSD licenses have their use's and places and you can make money using both (and still comply with them), actually I think only the truly stupid or arrogant run afoul of either license.

Re:the GPL is a mine field.

[AnwerB]

I've had to struggle with this also, but after all is said and done, I'm moving our whole embedded platform to linux.

This has had a few repercussion; namely, we're also doing away with the whole Windows client side of the application and replacing it with a web-app. It turns out that when you have a highly evolved embedded web server, scripting language, and database, an active client becomes unnecessary and can be replaced with a web browser.

By the way, just in case anyone else is doing this, in the embedded space I've found that LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) can be successfully replaced with LBSL (Linux-BOA-SQLite-LUA).

BOA is a little web server (less than 70KB). It uses the GPL license.

SQLite is a very efficient SQL database (about 200KB if you replace math library functions with an inline function). It is public domain.

LUA is a tiny (about 100-200KB, depending on modules compiled in) scripting language with a very elegant design. The math module can be rewritten to not use the math library. It uses the MIT license.

Each of these pieces of software has a different licenses, with SQLite and LUA basically allowing you to do what you please. BOA improvements must be opened up, however you can add functionality through CGI-like modules, and that will not need to be opened.

Re:Grr...

[justkarl]

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 marketsHowever, many are programmed in Java...Personally, I'd like to hack mine for the geek value.

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?

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.

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.

Re:Grr...

[Trejkaz]

Personally, I wanted a Linux phone, as it would have meant some semblance of power, without the niggling thought in the back of my mind that it was going to crash the next time I got an incoming call. I own a Linux router, which has already had its warranty broken via third-party firmware. I had to sacrifice the Linux PDA for something better supported, but I think I might repair that in a couple of years if things improve.

We're seeing a nice insurgence in the set-top box arena, too. I bet that by the time I need to actually upgrade from my Xbox, there will be a nice, even more free solution available off the shelf. :-)

Are mobile phones not embedded devices?

[jyristys]

Nokia and others ship millions of Symbian OS smartphones, yet somehow they are not showing up on the graphs..

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.

Re:Are mobile phones not embedded devices?

[jyristys]

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.

Oh? That Linux embedded device market share must be really huge if the biggest mobile phone manufacturer with it's licensees and competitors (also using Symbian OS) can't even make a dent.

Symbian was designed for mobile phones, and basically little else.

No. http://www.metalgrass.com/symbianinvestor/SymbHist .html

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:Not nearly that bad

[IamTheRealMike]

The GPL talks not just about derivative works but also combined works, which is far more easily done. Linking two pieces of code together in such a way that removing one would break the other basically makes it a combined work.

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...

My legal opinion....

[Kjella]

...is that IBMs lawyers probably knows a lot more about the GPL than your lawyers, and they seem to think it is okay. That leads me to believe that both your post and your link are to people that desperately try to create ambigiuity where there really is none, at least none of significance.

For one, you should sack your lawyers if they ever claimed you under any circumstances would be forced to release any source code. In a court of law, you might be liable for damages if you violated the licence, but you will never have to open your code. Someone might offer it as a settlement offer, but that is completely voluntarily.

Kjella

OSes better suited to this kind of app

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

So -- what OS is better suited to this kind of application?

Hate to play the role of the troll here [better say goodbye to those Karma points], but Linux has pretty lousy numbers for an embedded OS. Heck - "pretty lousy" is being generous - I've never seen Linux come in anywhere but dead last in an RTOS review.

In fact, the dirty little secret of the embedded OS marketplace is that WinCE is a rather solid, stable, and flexible platform:

http://www.windevnet.com/documents/s=7636/ddj0302g /0302g.htm

http://www.qnx.com/download/download/8124/QNX_Neut rino_v61_vs_VXAE_and_WinCE.pdf
[PDF DOCUMENT]

What's more, full-blown x86 Linux ain't exactly the cat's meow, either. People laugh at M$FT for their problems with WinFS & Longhorn, but that rusting, archaic, monolithic kernel, called "Linux," is a disaster waiting to happen.

Of course, some of the problem here may be semantics - people seem to think that if you build a SBC/PICMG platform, load it with "Linux," and call it a "firewall," then you're doing realtime work. Well, guess what - you're not. Realtime is an OS in a USAF jet, flying at Mach 3, reacting to a gazillion interrupts per second, trying to keep the pilot from both killing himself and from being killed by that SAM missile on his tail.

That's when you call in the grown-ups and the grown-up RTOSes.

Anyway, you can argue about what the words "embedded" and "realtime" mean, but, when the rubber hits the road, Linux is a very poor substitute for the real thing.

Re:OSes better suited to this kind of app

[dvrabel]

Embedded doesn't imply real-time. No one claims Embedded Linux is an RTOS (Though you can get things like RTLinux for real-time performance).