Looking back at ELC

The CELF Embedded Linux Conference is an interesting event, with a unique mixture of attendees. It is not a developer's conference, but plenty of free software developers could be found there. It's not a business conference, but business people were not in scarce supply either. There was far more representation from countries like Japan and Korea than can be found at many Linux-oriented conferences. All of these people came together to talk about the use and development of Linux in small, special-purpose systems.

They have plenty to talk about. Predictions for Linux in the embedded market have always been rosy, and they are getting better all the time. As Motorola's Scott Preece noted in one session, it is now expected that there will be over 200 million Linux-based phones in circulation by 2012. Linux shows up in special-purpose applications on a daily basis - often in unexpected places. Increasingly, Linux is the operating system of choice for small systems.

The royalty-free nature of Linux is certainly a reason for its success in the embedded field. If one is selling millions of gadgets, even a small per-unit royalty adds up in a hurry. But cost is not the real motivation here. The ways in which Linux can be modified for specific tasks and the general level of control it gives to vendors are both more important. Also, as Mr. Preece pointed out, there is a ready supply of Linux expertise out there for embedded companies to hire. On the other hand, very few developers go out and learn the Symbian platform on their own. There are advantages to going with a standard system.

Given this situation, one would have expected the ELC to be a large event, but it is, instead, surprisingly small. Quite a few embedded systems vendors were present - telephone handset manufacturers were especially well represented - but others were notable in their absence. ELC was not a particularly well-promoted event, which might partially explain its small size. Whatever the reason, it would be nice to see wider participation in the future; this community, like any other, needs to get together occasionally and talk.

Participation in the community was an ongoing theme of this conference, from Thomas Gleixner's opening keynote through to the end of the last day. Embedded vendors are famous for going their own way, neglecting to contribute their changes back, and generally pushing the GPL as far as they can. If there is one message which came out of this conference, it might be this: the embedded vendors are aware of their lack of participation and the problems it causes. Many of them - at least, those who came to this event - would like to make the situation better. But they often find themselves in a hard position.

Working with the community requires patience, openness, and a willingness to let go of some control. The embedded market, for the most part, does not reward those characteristics. Products come and go after a few months, and, once a product is out the door, and an embedded vendor has little motivation to continue to work with it. So merging product-specific changes back into the projects upon which they were based looks like a cost with little associated benefit. There is little intent to maintain that product into the future, and there will almost certainly be no big software upgrades for it. So the code looks dead. The fact that getting their work into the upstream repositories will help those projects support the next product better is beginning to get through to some companies, but it is a slow process.

Getting code into an upstream project - be it the kernel or higher-level software - goes best when that project is engaged from the beginning. A big after-release dump of previously unreviewed code tends to be hard to integrate at best. But the last thing a gadget maker wants to do is to release detailed internal information about its next product months before that product is announced. So late code dumps will likely be a best-case scenario for some time yet to come.

Consumer electronics products also tend to be quite static once they are shipped. When Nokia released a major software upgrade for the 770 tablet, it was the first time it had upgraded the software for any product in the field. Openness and modifiability are somewhat strange concepts for this industry. Products like the Nokia tablets and the OpenMoko phone are blazing new trails; many vendors are likely to be watching to see how well these experiments go.

Seen in this context, the announcement of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative fits right in. The GNOME developers, too, are looking to bring embedded vendors into their community and to get them to help make the platform better. They seem to be succeeding: the project claims that there are now more GNOME developers paid to work on embedded applications than on traditional desktop systems. GNOME is already a capable environment for embedded development, allowing developers to use the same software stack on all types of systems. If the project continues to be successful in getting embedded vendors to help build the platform, interesting things are certain to happen.

Some vendors have GPLv3 on their minds as well. Many of the libraries being used by embedded systems are licensed under the LGPL; once version 3 comes around, the LGPL will be essentially a patch to the GPL giving some extra permissions. So the LGPL will continue to allow proprietary applications to be used with the libraries. The LGPL does not, however, waive the anti-DRM provisions of GPLv3, meaning that users will have to be able to replace any LGPLv3-licensed libraries on their gadgets. Such replacement could allow application behavior to be changed in interesting ways - and badly mess up any lockdown scheme. How that will play out remains to be seen; embedded vendors may gain a renewed interest in technologies like SELinux or AppArmor to keep embedded applications firmly sandboxed.

These issues will certainly be worked out; the incentives to do so are strong. The embedded Linux community is on a roll, and rightly so. Linux has all of the right features and freedoms to be an attractive platform in that arena. If this industry can pull together into a true community - with the users as members too - there will be few limits on what it will be able to achieve.

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