From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <05765b085429865f54c42d315b473a94@borf.com> From: Brantley Coile To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:52:50 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a76cebee-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 There's also the constant friction caused by not using the solution of the day for embedded systems. It used to be only Vxworks. Now its slowly opening up to Linux because its the flavor of the week at IBM and Lucent looks at IBM as the model of a reincarnated big company. The GPL scares management somewhat which acts as a damping force. A problem with using Linux in embedded systems, and this would be true of any large source-only system, is that while it give the developers ready made tools, it also limits their solution to those tools. I watched one company use Linux pretty closely and it worked, but the solution is couched very high up. My first Embedded Unix product was shipped in 1988. It was based on V7 and was only 70K or so of kernel and a couple of small programs. The kernel was adapted to the applicaion. Worked really well. I recently looked into using Linux for an embedded system, but that didn't work out. It's not documented. I found it frustrating. Dropped it and went back to my own small kernels and just wrote more code, which I did faster than I could figure out how to get Linux to do what I wanted. Observation: A sufficently large amount of source == no source at all. (Hard to believe that the birthplace of Unix will be forced by management to use Windows!) Brantley