Embedded OS

[Daniel Poirot]

After 20 years in embedded development tools sales, I have seen a few things. 

Windriver is a great place to be from. They were always a good $200M company but they got swept away by the lure of the $32B IoT (before it had a name) space.

I have to say the same for IBM these days. More and more they are moving to one-click internet sales with less sales team interaction.

Redhat was an interesting group in the early days. My favorite quote from them was “Do you know how hard it is to sell free software?”

These days I am in Application Security. ‘Nobody’ writes secure code on purpose. They deal with it after development is done.

- Dan


Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Eric S. Raymond via devel
Sent: Sunday, November 5, 2017 12:50 AM
To: Hal Murray
Cc: devel at ntpsec.org
Subject: Re: Embedded OS

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> > However, the Go developers have stated that this is one of their major aims,
> > and it is easy to believe they will be funded to do this because the
> > business case for moving a lot of Google's Android devevelopment is *quite*
> > clear. 
> 
> I thought Android is/was derived from Linux.  Has it diverged enough to be 
> called an embedded OS?

:-)

A *lot* of "embedded OS" is stripped down and repackaged Linux these
days - not just on smartphones.  The economics of this are
interesting; older OSs like VRTX that ran on PICs and the like have
been in very rapid decline over the last decade not because of changes
in hardware costs - the PICS still have a significant BOM advantage at
large volumes -  but because finding people who can program in those
older environments has been getting difficult.

That is, a lot of the design wins that chips like the ARM32 have been
getting are for deployments where a PIC running a traditional,
pre-Linux embedded OS would be quite-sufficient and cheaper - only you
can't get that software development done any more without chasing down
one of a small coterie of increasingly elderly and very expensive
wizards.

Have you met Dave Taht?  He was an early dev at one of the companies
that cracked this space open for Linux.  He has a lot of funny and
occasionally disquieting stories about how this particular technology
transition went down.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

My work is funded by the Internet Civil Engineering Institute: https://icei.org
Please visit their site and donate: the civilization you save might be your own.


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