Posted on 07/13/2004 5:31:44 AM PDT by TheEngineer
CHICAGO — Driven by a hypercompetitive marketplace and the looming shadow of Linux, two of the biggest players in embedded software are shifting strategies in aggressive efforts to capture the minds and pocketbooks of developers.
Microsoft Corp. on Monday (June 28) will roll out its first-ever commercial-derivatives program for all licensees of Windows CE. The program, which lets developers modify and redistribute the Windows CE source code, is seen as an effort by the Redmond, Wash., software giant to make its code more accessible to developers, la Linux.
"This represents a major perception change in terms of the way programmers will view Microsoft and Windows CE," said Steve Maillet, chief executive officer and chief software architect for Embedded Fusion (Portland, Maine), a systems integrator that employs Windows CE.
Microsoft's move comes on the heels of embedded-software leader Wind River Systems Inc.'s rollout last week of its Workbench 2.0 integrated development environment, which allows developers to build embedded applications atop both Linux and its own VxWorks operating system.
The moves serve as the latest visible signal that the embedded industry's major players are acknowledging the real value of the open-source Linux operating system, and the competitive threat that it poses.
"The pervasive influence of open-source [software] is permeating the entire embedded industry," said Chris Lanfear, analyst for Venture Development Corp. (Natick, Mass.). "It's manifesting itself in different ways at Wind River and Microsoft, but it's clear that it's affecting the way both companies compete."
Perception issue
To be sure, Microsoft and Wind River framed their business moves as broader and more significant than a knee-jerk reaction to Linux. Linux's popularity, the companies maintained, is itself a reaction to the forces that have shaken the embedded industry to its foundations over the past three years. Among those are the ever-increasing complexity of application software, the intense pressure on OEMs to reduce lead times and the recessionary push on all players to cut costs.
"When you put those three dynamics together, it changes everything," noted John Bruggeman, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Wind River (Alameda, Calif.).
Indeed, industry observers believe those forces are largely responsible for the rise of embedded Linux in the first place.
Linux was seen as an elixir because it offered developers an inexpensive means to deal with the new complexities of the marketplace. As a result, many programmers have been vocal in their support of Linux, not only because of its cost (or lack thereof), but because it gave them access to, and control over, the operating system software kernel.
Analysts believe that loyalty among developers is at least one of the reasons behind Microsoft's commercial-derivatives program.
The program for the first time enables licensees of Windows CE to modify and redistribute changes they make to 2.5 million lines of shared source code in version 5.0. In the past, such freedoms were extended to a handful of premium licensees, but the new program will offer it to all embedded customers.
Furthermore, the company last week took pains to note that the so-called "derivatives" don't have to be shared with Microsoft or anyone else.
That, Microsoft executives say, gives Windows CE a leg up on Linux. Operating under the auspices of the general public license, Linux obliges users to make kernel modifications available to the public as a whole and, by extension, to competitors in the industry.
"OEMs have told us that if they are going to spend precious time and resources making modifications, they don't want their advantages made available to other customers," said John Starkweather, senior product manager for Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices Division.
Starkweather claims that the derivatives program actually encourages developers to innovate, not only because it gives them access to the source code, but because it does not call on them to share their changes.
Device builders and system integrators say the advantages may be more perception than reality, but they added that perception is important in the minds and hearts of developers.
"All programmers think they need to make changes, but when you come right down to it, most don't," said Maillet of Embedded Fusion. "But a lot of them won't even touch Windows CE because Microsoft hasn't let them make changes. That's always been a big criticism of Microsoft. That's why this [announcement] will ease their minds."
"This is only going to appeal to me in special cases," said Heinrich Munz, a strategic-product manager for Kuka Roboter (Augsburg, Germany), a maker of industrial robots that employs Windows CE in some products. "But I like to know it's there."
OS agnostics
Industry analysts said last week that the latest Microsoft effort will serve as one more piece of ammunition in the battle against roll-your-own operating systems.
"Linux changed the embedded road map because it opened people's minds to using a product that was prepackaged," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst of The Enderle Group (San Jose, Calif.).
"Now, the fact that they no longer have to share their intellectual property is going to be a big plus for those who had already opened their minds to Linux," he said.
Wind River, which is likewise targeting the roll-your-own crowd, is also changing tack in an appeal to the notoriously skeptical world of programmers. In February, the company announced it was teaming with Red Hat Inc. (Raleigh, N.C.) in an effort to develop a Linux-based embedded-software platform by 2005. Last week, it cemented its commitment to Linux by shipping Workbench 2.0, an integrated development environment based on Eclipse, an open-source application development framework that allows solution providers to add their own plug-in modules. The IDE, which is consistent with the company's new OS-agnostic approach, supports multiple operating systems, processors, languages and target environments.
'Postrecessionary behavior'
The new approach has been ripped by competitors, one of which compared the Red Hat-Wind River team to "two drowning men trying to save each other," especially given Wind River's longstanding criticism of Linux. Industry analysts, however, have generally supported the move, saying it was necessary in today's intensely competitive $762 million embedded-OS and tools market.
"It was clear that when the market started to come back, customers weren't coming back only to buy new Tornado licenses and VxWorks run-times," said Venture Development analyst Lanfear, referring to Wind River's proprietary offerings. A lot of them had migrated over to Linux for their telco infrastructure devices. It's a market-driven, postrecessionary behavior that has forced these companies to step up and compete very hard for a market that is still not substantial enough to carry all the vendors in it."
Wind River, however, only partially endorses such viewpoints.
The longtime embedded-software leader believes that the $762 million market figure may only be the tip of a much larger potential market. Citing the fact that typical embedded applications have grown from 100,000 to a million lines of code in the past two years, and that OEM lead times have dropped to as little as six months, the company's executives say they foresee a vast, untapped market among developers who have long refused to buy commercial operating systems and tools.
"Between 80 percent and 90 percent of the market is made up of in-house developers writing their own infrastructure for their applications," said Bruggeman of Wind River. "But developers don't have time to do that anymore. The costs are too prohibitive."
Bruggeman said Wind River believes the embedded pie could balloon to anywhere from $3 billion to $20 billion annually as these in-house groups look to commercial products. In that market figure, the company also includes other components, such as middleware, services and new layers of applications that lie somewhere between the OS and the end application.
Bruggeman added that end customers will benefit by having access to a tool set that enables them to use competing operating systems and software on separate projects, or even within the same project. Competition is now forcing software vendors to make such products available, he said.
"The end-customer market is changing dramatically," Bruggeman said. "We are being driven to embrace change because our customers are demanding it."
Bump for later.
Give Linux another 4-6 years and it will be a top notch operating system that will knock Microsoft for a loop. At this time it is still too heavy handed but it is getting better.
of interest
You are talking about Linux on the desktop.
Linux/Apache is already the number one webserver on the Internet, by far.
The point of this article is that Linux is already a dominant force in the embedded applications market - programs like the ones that run on the chips that run your car.
The embedded market is where the real growth potential is over the next decade, as more and more consumer products incorporate processors to perform taks that used to be performed mechanically.
This is indeed a classic case of Microsoft's greed coming back to bite em on the butt!
Even with its problems Linux is winning that battle because of Billy boy and his charge per seat mentality.
You're a communist! Only communists, Bill Clinton, and the Chinese use Linux! A true American patriot would only use Microsoft! </sarcasm>
Linux already is a top notch operating system. What you meant to say that in a few years it will be dumbed down to the point that even clods whose computer experience is surfing for pr0n and reading email will find it easy to install and use.
Linux is a good fit for many embedded applications. The economics of the situation make it a good investment to get the configuration/setup/etc. issues just right, because there will be thousands of identical copies put into production.
The desktop has completely different economics. The variation in systems, processors, peripherals, and, perhaps most importantly, levels of users mean that configuration must be both flexible and easy. That's hard to do, and it takes lots of time and money to do it right. Linux nibbles away at that, but Microsoft and Apple have a huge stake in continuing to do a better and better job there. So it is not at all clear that Linux can close that gap, because it's not obvious who will invest the money to do so. Even the head of Redhat says home users should just use Windows XP.
Servers are in-between. More variation than embedded, but less than desktop. A higher level of proficiency in users. So Linux can be competitive there, but so can Microsoft and others. Microsoft's strengths are in the small to mid-size company that doesn't really want to have a full-time IT staff, and companies that need very leading edge capabilities. Linux does better when a company expects to use lots of servers, but doesn't need them to be leading edge on technology like Web Services, or use lots of weird peripherals.
There's room for both. It continues to astonish me that Linux partisans sound like religious zealots in promoting their case. Technology is just a tool, folks. You use the tool that works best for you, and let the other guy do the same. And sometimes, any one of several tools will do the job.
No what I am saying is that I & the rest of the world stopped using the command line interface 10 years ago and I am not willing to go back now. The GUI is the future and Linux is sorely lacking in this arena. If I was younger I may put forth that effort however I have too much time and money invested in Microsoft products to do an about face now. I have one Linux server and it works well enough but is a nightmare to work on for me because I am now used to a GUI interface, as is the most of the rest of the computer using world. But it is far from a top notch operating system for the average user.
To each his own.
I'm not so sure that the level of proficiency required to police the security of XP as a multiuser home platform isn't approaching, or even exceeding, that required to install/maintain a recent release of Linux. It's at least getting to be near the same ballpark.
XP SP2 might change that but I'm beginning to think Windows might be a fatally flawed design with depth of the imbedded browser.
Great post.
How very interesting. In order to compete, MS has had to change paradigms and become more like its enemy.
Furthermore, the company last week took pains to note that the so-called "derivatives" don't have to be shared with Microsoft or anyone else. That, Microsoft executives say, gives Windows CE a leg up on Linux.
Smart move. While the GPL has been a catalyst for hobby-style development, the value-added business guys don't like it... for good reason.
"[Wind River's Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Curt] Schacker says Wind River is seeking a clear definition from either the Free Software Foundation or Linus Torvalds of what the GPL really means when it comes to embedded design. 'We want to offer anything that is of value to embedded developers and support that customer in that way. But as long as there are questions about the legal implications of the GPL, people are going to be very careful about moving forward' . . . "
"Stallman says that while he is going to try to clarify some of these issues... in the GPL version 3.0, he is not going to distinguish between embedded and non-embedded use in the GPL . . ."
So this is a very good strategic move by Microsoft, which needs to capture mindshare among third-party developers. These guys are not fools; they are professionals who are not swayed by doctored TCO studies and various other FUD. The GPL really frustrates their development efforts (see Linksys), and since most of Linux is "locked up" by the GPL, something's gotta give. (Hey Stallman!)
Maybe CE will get some help with its quality too.
Advantage Microsoft.
I agree. (Did I really just say that?) ;-)
Like you said in your post, the Linksys router case was a wake-up call to embedded developers to be on the lookout for IP grab by the GPL.
My interpretation of Microsoft's move is that it will continue to charge a per-device license for WindowsCE, yet still allow proprietary source code modification and redistribution.
The Linux's Hit Men article that you posted here on FR back in October underlined one of the biggest problems with the GPL in embedded systems. Microsoft is moving to take advantage.
Maybe CE will get some help with its quality too.
The article that you referenced stated: "the onboard computer crashed". Was it the WinCE operating system? The application written by BMW? The computer hardware itself?
"So it is not at all clear that Linux can close that gap"
Time is on Linux side. It has become obvious that there are only a finite amount of things left to do to the desktop that make any difference to the end user. After that, it is only a matter of time for Linux and FreeBSD to catch up. Longhorn is the last hurrah for Microsoft, mostly useless bloatware.
Touché.
I was actually looking for this article, which describes software problems in the 745i. Some 745i problems are fairly well-known now and upon further reflection I will concede that it looks like there are problems with BMW's applications, generally, not necessarily with CE itself.
The article I linked earlier was about a problem with the 5xx series and it wasn't clear whether that model even runs CE.
Ping!
Microsoft and Sun are slowly but apparently surely moving towards "sharing" more of their code. This does not mean giving their code to anyone in the world for free, and granting that person unlimited to rights to modify, duplicate, and even resell the software with no return revenue to them, as would be foolish. They will use non-GPL license agreements that grant access to the code and possibly the right to redistribute without release, but prohibit "forking". Makes perfect sense, and it is my long held belief that forking will ultimately stunt Linux, just as it did Unix. Microsoft has shown that standards are the future of computing, and the Linux crowd can't even seem to standardize on a desktop.
"Everything that can be invented has already been invented." (1899 U.S. Patent Office official, though the attribution is possibly apocryphal)
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