Resemblance to Enterprise Linux market (or not ?)

From Jim's article I can see a lot of resemblance to the Enterprise Linux market. It is a
balancing act between cost of maintaining an old release and the cost of moving your entire
computer park to the latest release.

In both cases, the cost of maintaining (and supporting) an old release is basicly outsourced
to a vendor (like RHEL, SLES or MontaVista) and often a lot cheaper than the cost of paying
in-house engineers/sysadmins to manage systems with a 6-month release cycle of the typical
bleeding-edge Linux distribution.

In a corporate environment the second option is no option at all. However for home-users with
only a few systems to maintain the decision boils down to preference and availability of own
time. With embedded systems there are almost no home-users and therefor not a real community
market, like the bleeding-edge distributions thrives on.

This however means that the whole embedded development is owned by vendors and what is being
contributed is decided by those vendors and competitive forces. There is little
community-driven development. That difference is in contrast what most of us are used to in
the distribution market.