How not to sell embedded Linux

> Mr. Ready is perpetrating the fallacy that, to build an embedded system with Linux, one
starts with the various components and integrates them all by hand. If a company were to take
that path, it might well incur the high costs that Mr. Ready warns about. Creating your own
distribution - and maintaining it over a product's life - is, indeed, a difficult and
expensive job. 


I've seen it done.

It's tough coming from a PC-Linux background and seeing people who are experienced developers
otherwise deal with trying to roll their own Linux system when they are just trying to get
started.

It's absolutely a great learning experience and for that that approach can be valuable.. but
they don't quite understand that Linux systems available from other organizations  don't have
be taken at face value.. the benefit of Linux is a flexible system, but you do not have to do
it all by yourself  from scratch to get that.  But these developers, I think, generally only
see things from two perspectives... source code and proprietary binary distributions. That
is.. its either something you have to do yourself or you buy in a packaged deal from somebody
else. 

It's the middle ground between those two extremes is were the value is at. Take what you can
directly from distributions or vendors and benefit from their experience and widely used and
tested systems... and then modify it to suite your needs only when you have to. 

Each modification you make is more work for you. 

Linux distros provide the 90%, you have to do the 10%. 

That is the sort of thing that embedded developers often don't 'get' right away. Once they
start down the path of total customization then they can get trapped in it and it just makes
things more and more difficult and expensive as they diverge with aging code bases, most of
which ends up being a in-house fork and the rest of the Linux world moves on.

I think this sort of problem is more common then is apparent. For us experienced in PC or
Server stuff it's a no-brainer. For embedded developers it's not so obvious.