Linux in consumer electronics
Linux in consumer electronics
Posted Oct 11, 2007 1:57 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)Parent article: Linux in consumer electronics
I'd guess the most important reason for choosing linux is source code, so they aren't beholden to capricious proprietary vendors. I worked on one firmware project where the vendor drove us crazy with their lack of support. Even worse would be if the vendor goes out of business or takes their product in an unwanted direction, or, worst nightmare of all, strikes up some exclusive deal with a competitor. I could easily imagine Microsoft doing that if you annoyed them with, say, public criticism.
Posted Oct 11, 2007 6:12 UTC (Thu)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (2 responses)
1 - desire for source code access on its own terms
A lot of these are similar/overlapping ideas but they're different sorts of decision making processes that get you there. Proprietary platforms really were never competitive in terms of market share to the make-it-ourselves mindset.
What the proprietary vendors had were superior centralization of management, a broader driver market, superior development tools, and .. *sometimes* focused technology for niche areas. Linux defeats the first two outright, and tools vendors can easily sell stuff for developing on Linux. It's only the niche technology stuff that would still have you using something else.
Well, that and targets that are "too small" to run linux. No one's rearing to run linux on a 16bit microcontroller.
At least, that's my perspective.
Posted Oct 11, 2007 9:04 UTC (Thu)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 11, 2007 18:35 UTC (Thu)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
What the proprietary vendors had -- in comparison to completely home-grown solutions -- were superior centralization of management, a broader driver market, superior development tools, and .. *sometimes* focused technology for niche areas.
From my experience working at a proprietary OS vendor, the driving factors were:Linux in consumer electronics
2 - the way projects come about, buying a package to build something doesn't work for projects that sort of accidentally emerge
3 - wanting complete control over their projects, whether or not they have the skills to make that a reality
4 - seeing linux as a way to cut costs from continuing to maintain their existing home-grown OS (this was the majority of the market not ten years ago)
5 - ability to fix bugs that crop up
Linux has pretty good driver support. Certainly for any mid-sized project (for example embedded systems with mini-PCI buses) it makes choosing devices easy if they have a Linux driver. Sure Windriver would write a network driver or a SCSI driver for vxWorks but we would pay a lot for it and if we wanted to switch devices in a later design we would have to pay again.Linux in consumer electronics
It seems my choice of phrasing was not clear enough, here it is with an addition:Linux in consumer electronics