Umm... you certainly are "free" to study the OS X kernel (also known as Darwin), or Quicktime Streaming Server or Rendezvous...
I personally believe Apple has made good use of the open source concept - the issue is that one of Apple's best assets is the IP behind user experiences, UIs, and making things simple - this is the stuff they aren't going to give away for free - and shouldn't - its what makes Apple, Apple.
Try and copy/paste text between all of your Linux apps... its hard enough just between, say KDE apps, and pretty darn impossible between different GUI frameworks... what percentage actualyl works?
I am an embedded sw engineer - working on mulitple set-top-box solutions - some use embedded linux and some use VxWorks, and I must say that 90% of our development and debugging is done on VxWorks by choice.
The interactive 'C' based target shell simply rules... once your object code has been loaded onto your target - you can execute any public function from the shell command line - can this be done in Linux? (btw, this is not a rhetorical question... can this be done in linux?)
I agree that the Tornado IDE is buggy and unreliable, but I simply use it for doing the builds and managing the makefiles - I use VC 6 IDE for all of the code editing and project managament.
The real-time architecture of VxWorks is also much nicer to work with than any rtLinux I have seen. Threads and processes are given a priority, and those priorities are obeyed - none of this having to run in "kernel" space vs user space, etc... Timers are much more acurate, and interrupt timing is extremely reliable and accurate (which is absolutely necessary for video appplications).
We also rely heavily on WindML - the VxWorks graphics and events architecture - which I also believe out performs and is much easier to work with than any X-windows system I have seen. I have never understood why you would want a client/server window/graphics system on an embedded device anyway. Give me framebuffers, overlay surfaces, and fast blits anyday over the overly complex window server architecture...
I don't hate linux - I use it everyeday, but I am not convinced that it has a place in the embedded world...
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Umm... you certainly are "free" to study the OS X kernel (also known as Darwin), or Quicktime Streaming Server or Rendezvous...
I personally believe Apple has made good use of the open source concept - the issue is that one of Apple's best assets is the IP behind user experiences, UIs, and making things simple - this is the stuff they aren't going to give away for free - and shouldn't - its what makes Apple, Apple.
Try and copy/paste text between all of your Linux apps... its hard enough just between, say KDE apps, and pretty darn impossible between different GUI frameworks... what percentage actualyl works?
I am an embedded sw engineer - working on mulitple set-top-box solutions - some use embedded linux and some use VxWorks, and I must say that 90% of our development and debugging is done on VxWorks by choice.
The interactive 'C' based target shell simply rules... once your object code has been loaded onto your target - you can execute any public function from the shell command line - can this be done in Linux? (btw, this is not a rhetorical question... can this be done in linux?)
I agree that the Tornado IDE is buggy and unreliable, but I simply use it for doing the builds and managing the makefiles - I use VC 6 IDE for all of the code editing and project managament.
The real-time architecture of VxWorks is also much nicer to work with than any rtLinux I have seen. Threads and processes are given a priority, and those priorities are obeyed - none of this having to run in "kernel" space vs user space, etc... Timers are much more acurate, and interrupt timing is extremely reliable and accurate (which is absolutely necessary for video appplications).
We also rely heavily on WindML - the VxWorks graphics and events architecture - which I also believe out performs and is much easier to work with than any X-windows system I have seen. I have never understood why you would want a client/server window/graphics system on an embedded device anyway. Give me framebuffers, overlay surfaces, and fast blits anyday over the overly complex window server architecture... I don't hate linux - I use it everyeday, but I am not convinced that it has a place in the embedded world...