Wind River Systems Inc. today launched a version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution targeting mobile phones, set-top boxes, PVRs (personal video recorders), and other small-footprint consumer electronics devices. The company expects its Platform for Consumer Electronics, Linux Edition to be used in several mobile phone designs shipping before 2006.

Wind River shipped its first embedded Linux OS product in late February of this year, with the release of Platform for Network Equipment, Linux edition (PNE). It followed up in May with a General Purpose Platform, Linux edition, a medium-footprint OS similar to the Network platform, but without clustering and high-availability features. Today's release of “Platform for Consumer Electronics, Linux Edition,” adds a small-footprint Linux distribution, and gives the company separate Linux OS products targeting large, medium, and small-footprint devices.

Platform for Consumer Electronics, Linux edition

Wind River's VP of Marketing John Bruggeman asserts that compared with commercial embedded Linux distributions from competitors, Wind River's CE (consumer electronics) Linux platform is more open, exerts less vendor lock-in, and will enjoy a more regular release schedule. Additional claimed advantages are royalty-free licensing, extensive testing and validation, world-class development tools, a worldwide support organization, and corporate stability.

Bruggeman says Wind River's CE Linux platform is more open than other commercial embedded distributions, because it provides a build wizard that lets developers start out with “pristine,” unpatched kernel.org sources. The wizard can be used to add in Wind River-validated patches, such as those available from CELF, or to add in user-supplied patches. But, says Bruggeman, “Our build system lets you do your build with clear visibility back, so you never get an unintentional fork.”

Bruggeman says Wind River will update its CE Linux platform semi-annually. Set release schedules flout the open source credo of releasing “when it's ready,” to some degree, but Bruggeman says customers like them, since they help them plan their own product roadmaps. “Vendors want to know how to get from one version to the next. They don't mind waiting, but they need to know how they can get there,” he said.

Another competitive advantage of its CE Linux platform will be per-developer, per-year subscription-based licensing, “regardless of project, processor, or site,” Wind River says. This model provides a predictable, fixed fee structure that Bruggeman calls “the only option” in the mobile phone market. “We haven't found the mobile customer that will pay [royalties] when they have an option,” he said.

Middleware, on the other hand, will continue to be available from Wind River under royalty-bearing licenses. “Middleware is different,” Bruggeman said. “The customer will perceive the value of middleware. We're not eschewing the royalty business. It's good money, if you can get it.”

Additional claimed benefits of Wind River's CE Linux platform include:

• Supported by Workbench, Wind River's Eclipse-based development suite, said to support the complete development lifecycle, from board bring-up to applications development and testing
• Testing and validation using well-proven device software development methodologies
• Scalability across a range of industry-specific solutions, including networking, consumer, automotive, and general purpose device applications, and incorporating patches from CELF, CGL (Carrier Grade Linux), and SAF (Service Availability Forum)
• Extensibility to integrate “any available ISV applications or middleware that are not yet accepted or supported by the open source community” — including real-time patches, Wind River says
• A “Linux Services Practice” to extend customer engineering resources, including design, integration, and optimization capabilities
• Educational Services “credits” included with licenses that can be used by customers to build in-house Linux expertise
• Platform subscription fees include “full access” to Wind River's worldwide support organization
• “Commercial-grade assurance” based on corporate longevity of 23 years in the device software market

The company also announced today that is adding support for ARM Ltd.'s TrustZone security mechanism to its embedded Linux platforms and development tools. TrustZone provides a hardware-based security foundation for products based on ARM processors, which, according to LinuxDevices.com's survey data, are the most commonly used processors in devices based on embedded Linux.

Analysis — a battle royale brewing

Wind River's initial efforts to market its CE Linux product seem to directly address areas where competitors have faced criticism, leading to the impression that the long-time (if recently deposed) embedded software revenue leader closely observed early embedded Linux vendors before making its own assertive moves into the market.

For example, prior to its recent move to a 2.6-series kernel, MontaVista was sometimes criticized for trying to lock customers into patched source trees — a criticism rebutted recently by Mike Matthews, product line manager of MontaVista Linux Professional Edition. Wind River appears bent on warding off similar potential criticisms by touting the openness of its CE Linux platform, and its basis in “pristine” community source code. Building business around open standards has become a key market focus for Wind River.

Additionally, MontaVista has been criticized for infrequent product releases — two years passed between the releases of Pro 3.1 and Pro 4.0. Wind River says releases at six month intervals will help customers benefit from evolving mainstream Linux features and capabilities.

Finally, MontaVista has moved to royalty-bearing licensing for some of its largest customers. Surveys administered by LinuxDevices and others have repeatedly shown that developers prefer up-front licensing fees. Wind River says it will not charge royalties for anything except middleware-level software.

In summary, Wind River appears to be positioning its CE Linux product very much in competition with similar products from MontaVista, such as that company's Linux CE Edition and Mobilinux offerings.

Market analysts have long foreseen a battle royale brewing in the mobile phone OS market between Symbian, Microsoft, and a number of Linux vendors. Thus far, MontaVista has been the clear leader among mobile phone Linux OS suppliers. Now, with handsets on the way powered by Wind River's brand of Linux, a tug-of-war for the Linux mobile phone market segment appears imminent.

MontaVista has benefitted from a strong alliance with mobile phone stack supplier Trolltech. It will be interesting to see whether newcomer PalmSource, which is busy converting Palm OS into a software stack running on Linux, taps Wind River as a Linux OS partner in the mobile phone space, as has been rumored. For its part, however, MontaVista already announced an alliance with PalmSource in August.

In any event, multi-vendor competition bodes well for Linux's chances against single-vendor operating systems such as Windows Mobile and Symbian, since competitors in the Linux space end up contributing to an evolving shared base of open source software.

Analysts see embedded Linux and Windows Mobile jostling for the number two spot behind Symbian, in the high-end “smartphone” segment of the mobile phone market. In July, Gartner reported that Linux was substantially ahead of Windows Mobile in Q1 of 2005 worldwide shipments, at 13.7 percent to 4.5 percent, while IDC said Windows Mobile led Linux slightly in 2004 “converged mobile device” market share, by 12.7 percent to 11.3 percent. Both analyst firms agree that Symbian OS is the clear leader, however, at 76.2 percent (Gartner) and 55.9 percent (IDC) in their respective surveys.

In competing with Linux, Microsoft's claims that the cost of Linux middleware drives Linux costs higher than Windows Mobile, even though the Linux OS itself is free. Wind River's Bruggeman disputes the effectiveness of that argument, however, saying, “I haven't lost a handset deal to [Microsoft] yet, that I'm aware of — that I got to compete in. And I expect to pick up more of that opportunity in the future.”

VDC's Chris Lanfear told LinuxDevice.com, “I think [Wind River] is going to surprise a lot of folks — vendors and editors — with their impact on Linux. VDC is still working on what the number might be, but I think it is bigger than folks might expect.”

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.