There’s nothing new about Linux in the notion that people might want to do it themselves. In the old days, before Linux was a viable option for most mobile and embedded devices, people were writing their own RTOSes. When I would walk into Motorola many years ago, they had all sorts of different RTOSes. In a sense, they had open source. It was their own internal stuff, and they could do whatever they wanted. Linux hasn’t changed that.

Today, the temptation for device manufacturers to roll their own OS is still strong. The only difference between now and the old days is that the amount of software that we’re talking about now is huge. It’s probably a factor of 100 to 1000 more lines of software than it was back in the old days.

Presumably, when you download Linux, that source code is yours now, and as you start to modify it a bit and adapt it to your hardware, it’s sort of related to open source, but it’s your own copy now. But even though the open source software is “free” in a sense, there are still costs associated with it. So, if you’re considering rolling your own Linux, the question becomes is downloading Linux and adapting it yourself really cost effective? Should you be spending your engineering time doing that or should you buy a commercial version of Linux and have your engineers work on things that make your product better?

My answer is that in most cases, rolling your own Linux is a waste of time and engineering resources, especially if you think about differentiating your product. Every engineer should be oriented around whatever differentiation works in your market for your product, and you should have a supplier for the foundational pieces (such as Linux) that you need to work.

What’s remarkable is that many device manufacturers don’t even consider the commercial Linux options available to them. The common practice is for companies, under the notion that they think they’re saving money, to try the do-it-yourself approach. Unfortunately for them, the do-it-yourself approach generally costs more in development time than any temporary cost benefits they receive from sticking with open source in the first place.

That’s the fundamental value proposition from MontaVista is that even at the highest level, if you are capable of monkeying with Linux yourself, why bother?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Embedded Linux.