Venture Development Corporation, a technology market research and strategy firm, has recently published “Linux in the embedded system market“, a study revealing that embedded hardware makers prefer non-commercial Linux solutions over commercial ones.
The author, Stephen Balacco, stated:
While some OEMs have chosen to use a commercial Linux solution, more are using and/or expect to use a publicly available Linux solution in future project development. It is this trend that will continue to put pressure on commercial Linux suppliers to provide value above and beyond the growing sophistication of publicly available Linux solutions.
VDC survey’s graphs (current&expected users), reported by Linuxdevices.com
Survey respondents, chosen from embedded systems developers, were 428. As you can see 12% of them use non-commercial Linux distro, while only 3 percent use a commercial Linux OS. VDC asked also about future plans and discovered that 20% of interviewed developers plan to use a non-commercial Linux distro and only 5% a commercial one.
No surprise that non-commercial is the hardware makers’ favourite choice, allowing them to avoid the burden of licensing and to make savings maintaining internally their platforms.
Balacco talking about the preference for non-commercial distros said:
[the preference] will continue to put pressure on commercial Linux suppliers to provide value above and beyond the growing sophistication of publicly available Linux solutions.
I totally agree, let’s see how will eventually react commercial Linux suppliers to this challenge..
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