EMF changes tune, hails embedded Linux (LinuxDevices)

 Am I the only one who thinks it might be a little disingenuous to characterize this as
"changing their tune" and "recanting" their earlier message when this report is coming out
FOUR YEARS after the other one to which it is being compared?  Am I the only one who finds
this particularly
abrasive given that, according to TFA the new study cites changes in the
product offerings as having changed the situation during that time?

 Not that I'm defending the original article.  EMF was, in all probability, acting as a brazen
shill for a certain Redmond based software company.  In fact I would even go so far as to
suggest that it might just be the case that this more recent study might be the result of a
*lack* of subsequent funding from same.  (What, they don't want to renew this year!?!  Let's
publish this and see how they feel for the next round)!

 Of course the part that I find most irksome is that anyone listens to these shills after
they've been outed.  The real story that deserves some real journalistic investigation is the
one that asks the question: "Who's market analysis can be trusted?"

 Personally I really don't know much about the embedded systems market nor about which RTOS is
best suited to any particular niche therein.  I could generally guess that "deeply" embedded
systems (on microcontrollers, and various 8 and 16 bit CPUs such as 6809, 68K, etc) still
mostly use specialized systems like eCOS, iTRON, (what's left of) pSOS , and the like.  The
major shift in recent years as been that cooler, low-power versions of 32-bit microprocessor
designers are continuing to become available and ever-lower price points --- so that "full"
operating system kernels (such as Linux) are becoming more interesting as "embedded systems"
for an ever broader range of applications.  (Also manufacturers continue to add more features
into their consumer products in their passion to compete.  For cell phones, digital cameras,
PDAs and MP3 players (and the sundry convergences of all those), automotive electronics
applications, digital musical instruments, toys and portable video games, and even things like
toasters, for all of these devices "more features" mostly translates to more CPU horsepower,
more memory and flash storage and vastly more complex embedded software.  The demand for more
complex applications drives the demand for Linux and WinCE based embedded systems (primarily
due to the availability of programmers and development tools for these systems).

 I don't have to know much about these things to understand how these dynamics are playing
out.

 I might value a study of over a thousand embedded systems programs across many segments of
the market and detailing their experiences of the available embedded systems products
(targets), development toolchains, and hosts.  However, I wouldn't trust one from EMF and I
would take anything published with a grain of salt.  We need something more like a Wikipedia
or Groklaw --- an open, collaborative effort to gain any confidence in such a study these
days.

Jim Dennis
(Former Linux Gazette "Answer Guy")