Wind River Joins the Mobile Linux Fray

An anonymous reader writes "Embedded software powerhouse Wind River launched a Consumer Electronics Linux distribution today targeting 'mobile phones, set-top boxes, PVRs, and other small-footprint consumer devices.' The company says several phones based on its brand of Linux will begin shipping before the end of this year, and is rumored to have teamed with PalmSource, which itself is busy converting Palm OS into a software stack for Linux mobile phones."

Comments

Is this the same wind river that maintains

[Trigun]

PyQT and PyKDE bindings?

Re:Is this the same wind river that maintains

[Anonymous Coward]

PyQT and PyKDE bindings?

I think you mean Riverbank.

Good thing is

[cached]

The good thing is that in any event, multi-vendor competition bodes well for Linux's chances against single-vendor operating systems such as Windows Mobile and Symbian, since competitors in the Linux space end up contributing to an evolving shared base of open source software.

Re:Good thing is

[rufty_tufty]

Really, last I heard more people buy the bulk of their things from Wallmart than from their local grocer.
Isn't too many options a bad thing that as a customer of Linux I don't know who to buy.

Last I checked a few goliaths competing tended to advance further than lots of Davids each with the fixed overheads then repeating the same work.

That said, Windriver do some pretty nifty RTOS stuff with VxWorks, so I'm glad they're progressing with their Linux solution

Re:Good thing is

[Akoma The Immortal]

No No No. You are supposed to say:

"The good thing is that in any event, multi-vendor competition DOES NOT bode well for Linux's chances against single-vendor operating systems such as Windows Mobile and Symbian, since competitors in the Linux space end up contributing to an regressing shared base of pirated software."

I will cancell you check and send SB to your office for chair reorganization.

Sincerely,

Billy G,
CEO, CFO, Chairman and what not.

Rumored to have teamed with PalmSource?

[Sam Haine '95]

From TFA:

It will be interesting to see whether newcomer PalmSource, which is busy converting Palm OS into a software stack running on Linux, taps Wind River as a Linux OS partner in the mobile phone space, as has been rumored. For its part, however, MontaVista already announced an alliance with PalmSource in August.

PalmSource have always claimed that PalmOS-for-Linux is to be distro-agnostic, allowing the hardware manufacterer to decide which distro to use.

Liscensing

[rufty_tufty]

Looking at the article they're planning to liscense this on a per devloper per year basis. One thing I don't get though is how this fits in with the GPL, surely the key thing Windriver offer is tweeks to the kernel to make it a good RTOS and associted BSPs for the various phones. But those would have to be GPLed as well.
So what is there here that isn't GPLed and therefore why would someone pay for this? Or is it the tools, this CELF of which they speak?

Re:Liscensing

[slashflood]

Or is it the tools, this CELF of which they speak?

Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) (currently down)

All the major consumer electronics comanies are members of CELF.

Re:Liscensing

[thegrassyknowl]

WindRiver still sell their ScopeTools (MemScope, ProfileScope, StethoScope) that rely on a proprietary backend being loaded onto the Linux box. I, personally, don't think the tools are worth the price of the plastic in the CDs they come on. Others here seem to like them.

You also get WindRiver Workbench (an Eclipse plugin). It's cute but there are better editors and debuggers out there if you must pay for them. I prefer Emacs for editing and good old-fashioned Makefiles for building. I much prefer DDD (data display debugger) which is based on GDB for debugging.

Their "system Viewer" (aka WindView) is nothing more than the free (speech/beer) Linux Trace Tool (LTT) from http://www.opersys.com/LTT/.

WindRiver also have a very restrictive license that tries to claim you're not allowed to redistribute the source code to any of the GPL tools. I haven't read it in full but that is the general gist of it.

Management types seem to love them because they have "support". Support is fine, when support can help. I don't see how paying approx $50k US/year for "support" works when I have solved all of the problems we find with the Linux distributions we have used. Speaking of problems, the only ones with real problems were the expensive "commercial" ones.

MontaVista are probably the most trimmed down and GPL friendly of the embedded Linux crowds. They give out their distro on CD and because It's GPL'd they can't stop you using it. Their supplied "tools" are based on OSS tools like GDB. We weren't allowed to even see the tools before we paid for them. They claim that there are screenshots available; like that really helps decide if it's good!

BlueCat won't work unless your development host is RedShit9. They use an encrypted ISO image that they mount via loopback to install. Of course, they were too dumb to use a real encryption and, instead, used XOR so the password is visible just by looking into the encrypted file with Less. You can then xor the file agains the password to get an unencrypted ISO that you can mount and install. Their distro looks like it was based on Scratchbox (see below). Their "tools" are also based on OSS tools. They let us see the tool at a demo by the sales guy, but they wouldn't let us actually get hands-on to see what the tool could really do.

BuildRoot is GPL and free (speech and beer). It comes from the uClibc group and makes a uClibc-based distro. It works beautifully and has a wonderful mailing list/support. It is a piece of cake to add packages to it and get it to build them for you. I added some very complex pieces of software with almost zero effort apart from making a makefile to do various parts of the build (download the tarball, uncompress it, untar it, configure it, make it, install it, clean it). All you have to do is put in the right commands to do each of those steps under the right targets. You can have your package appear in their make menuconfig menu and it has a cool dependency arrangement so it's easy to remove packages without breaking anything.

Scratchbox is similar, but it attempts to create an entire hidden build environment inside your host that you chroot into to use. You can build/install everything inside of it without really worrying about cross compile issues (you're in a chroot so the compiler/headers/libs are defaulted to cross compile correctly). It's also free as in beer. Scratchbox can build anything, including Linux, BSD, glibc, uclibc on i386, arm, ppc, etc. It doesn't care as long as you can build a toolchain to put inside of it before you start building packages.

There are also umpteen other tiny Linux builds to do different things available and they are all free. There are routers, firewalls, mail servers, single disk console-based things, two disk X-things with web browsers, etc.

These companies make a profit by relying on the ignorance of management-types that want "support" and think that paying for something is good business sense because it must be good. This is the problem you get when you let accountants run businesses instead of engineers! If you want support, pay for it, otherwise get buildroot or Scratchbox and have quality.

"pristine kernel sources"

[jhoger]

So is the kernel redistributable under the GPL once it has been patched by WindRiver's wizard? Anyone know the license they use on the patches, or do you end up with a tainted kernel which cannot be redistributed without a separate license agreement from WindRiver?

Such a wizard sounds like a great way to sneak around the license to me, or at least pass on liability to customers.

-- John

Re:"pristine kernel sources"

[jhoger]

Well, it seems clear that the customer would have an obligation to when they distribute it. The creator of the wizard supplies a tool that downloads the kernel from kernel.org and patches it. The user runs the tool, so the user downloads the kernel, the user does the patches. the user redistributes the end result in their product.

Who has liability? The end user certainly. But what about the creator of the wizard? Quite possibly, none at all.

The creator of the wizard never redistributed the kernel, so the GPL is not binding on them. Patches typically contain some context information (lines of source) for syncing up the patch tool, but that could be considered 'fair use.'

-- John.

Why would I want such a thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would I want a WinDriver in my linux kernel?

/* gets coat */

It's all about the tools

[Wesley Felter]

All the embedded Linux companies have non-open-source tools and documentation; that's really what they're selling (since the kernel and userland are free).

Re:What's the deal with Palm?

[AuMatar]

Why wouldn't they? There are N companies planning Linux pdas and M planning Windows CE ones. If they support both their potential customer base is N+M, instead of N or M. Unless N or M is small, it makes the most sense to keep the biggest pool.

Developers Are Their Customers

[RichiP]

I agree that competition is good and is necessary in order for companies and their products to improve as best they can (not to mention more choices for consumers and lesser chances of price-fixing), both Wind River and Montavista should always be aware that they both have a responsibility to the developers who are their customers. The danger here is that bickering and fragmentations might paint a bleak landscape to developers and drive them towards Windows. It would be the Unix Wars all over again.

I believe that these two companies should develop and improve their products as best they can but always collude on making things easier for developers to share the same codebase. Since they're now working in an opensource environment, technical prowess in their engineers as well as great customer service are where they will be competing in. With equal access to source (assuming they release them), it would be in service satisfaction that would differentiate them most. If I were device manufacturer, I would more likely choose the company with the better team of engineers as well as customer service reps.