After reading the Green Hills' website pretty thoroughly, it's clear that Green Hills is promoting their operating system and tools specifically where they have obvious advantages over Linux. Their Integrity operating system claims to offer virtual address space protection for applications and device drivers, guaranteed resource availability, bounded kernel response time, POSIX support, very impressive performance claims for minimum interrupt latencies and fast context switch times, and it's royalty free. They also have an impressive list of middleware applications and support for a lot of embedded boards. Finally, we all see surveys about how Linux developers want better tools for application development, well Green Hills has a lot of graphics showing how they can debug multi-tasking embedded programs. If Linux had these kinds of tools, it would probably help in increasing more widespread adoption of Linux in the embedded world. Finally, it appears that, if you look at many of their customers vs. many of the typical companies that build products with Linux, the Green Hills customers seem to be those that make products that require very fast, bounded response times (unlike a PDA for example). I didn't see any PDAs on Green Hills' website. There was one posting that Green Hills must be losing a lot to Linux, but the Green Hills claims on their website that they grew 29% in 2003 and that they were profitable. In summary, I'd have to say that they offer a lot of the same advantages as Linux (royalty free operating system with memory protection) with integrated tools. I don't think that they are going after the same customers as Linux companies do (you'll see a lot of aerospace customers listed on their website), so I would guess that their customers (aerospace) are willing to pay for their proprietary software and operating system while companies that make PDAs and the like will still be ideal targets for Linux-based solutions.
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After reading the Green Hills' website pretty thoroughly, it's clear that Green Hills is promoting their operating system and tools specifically where they have obvious advantages over Linux. Their Integrity operating system claims to offer virtual address space protection for applications and device drivers, guaranteed resource availability, bounded kernel response time, POSIX support, very impressive performance claims for minimum interrupt latencies and fast context switch times, and it's royalty free. They also have an impressive list of middleware applications and support for a lot of embedded boards. Finally, we all see surveys about how Linux developers want better tools for application development, well Green Hills has a lot of graphics showing how they can debug multi-tasking embedded programs. If Linux had these kinds of tools, it would probably help in increasing more widespread adoption of Linux in the embedded world. Finally, it appears that, if you look at many of their customers vs. many of the typical companies that build products with Linux, the Green Hills customers seem to be those that make products that require very fast, bounded response times (unlike a PDA for example). I didn't see any PDAs on Green Hills' website. There was one posting that Green Hills must be losing a lot to Linux, but the Green Hills claims on their website that they grew 29% in 2003 and that they were profitable. In summary, I'd have to say that they offer a lot of the same advantages as Linux (royalty free operating system with memory protection) with integrated tools. I don't think that they are going after the same customers as Linux companies do (you'll see a lot of aerospace customers listed on their website), so I would guess that their customers (aerospace) are willing to pay for their proprietary software and operating system while companies that make PDAs and the like will still be ideal targets for Linux-based solutions.