Compariing apples & oranges? [LWN.net]

Compariing apples & oranges?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 16:43 UTC (Wed) by kokopelli (guest, #11341)
Parent article: Analyst: embedded Linux costs more

I'm not a trained seal and I don't jump through hoops to get untitled documents, but I wonder how many subtle biases were in that study.

The most obvious has already been addressed - are they comparing experienced Windows developers working in Windows vs. Linux, or experienced people working in their own comfort zone?

But I've worked on enough embedded projects to have an even more compelling question: what are they trying to do? Could the Windows projects have a smaller scope? Could they be creating embedded devices that have to interoperate with specific proprietary systems? Could the project itself be selected with an eye towards the tools available for that platform?

Finally, if this is true then why is the marketplace so clearly going the other way? It looks like stovepipe systems are finally dying, but the market seems to be going towards Wind River and Linux-based systems (e.g., Lynx became Lynix or something like that), not embedded Windows. It's not like Microsoft has no name recognition in this market - one of most annoying things about embedded development is that so many of the cross-compiler tools are needlessly platform-specific. (At my last job we actually used the Gnu toolchain for the cross-compiler, but we had to use Windows because they only ported a few of the cross-compiler tools to Windows. "Who does development on Unix/Linux systems?!")

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