Wind River Blog Network

Why a good platform can't be free

By Doug Schaefer

I sure am having fun thinking about OpenConsole, i.e., a Linux based set top box that plays in the same space as Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo, but is really an evolution of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) into gaming, but all using open licensing so you don't have to pay the big boys to write applications for this platform. The underlying technologies are pretty cool as I play with adding OpenGL graphics to the qemu emulator. But the business side of it is interesting as well.

In particular, my thoughts turned to multimedia support on open platforms. This is where the insistence on Linux being free is really biting the hand that feeds you. Not all good software can be free. We do live in a world of patents and a lot of the key technology that goes into a multimedia system is protected by patents and require a license to legally distribution implementations of that technology.

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A cool multi-platform CDT use case

By Doug Schaefer

I previously blogged about the VitualBox SDK and the capability it provides to build some really interesting emulation environments, 3D graphics being the one I'm most interested in at the moment. And this is something I'm seeing in the embedded industry a lot lately. Hardware is expensive. These boxes we have on our desks are very powerful and relatively pretty cheap. Being able to emulate hardware during the software development phase of a project gives the developer the ability to get his code up and running much earlier.

So looking at how I'd build an emulator for a Linux set-top box that had 3d graphic capabilities, it quickly became apparent again how the multi-platform capabilities of the CDT gives me an top class C/C++ IDE to do work on all of the components.

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Coming Live from Google Chrome

By Doug Schaefer

Well, it's live and I've downloaded it and am using it to write this blog entry. It's Google Chrome. It's a beta, but from what I've seen in the couple of minutes I've used it, it's delivering as promised. Very fast and smooth, even typing here. Better than Firefox? Seems like it, but maybe it's the chrome blinding me. And given the news volume about it, there's a lot of people speculating about what Google is trying to accomplish with this thing.

At any rate, if it is about making the Web the OS as we've been trying to do for centuries now, what does it mean to C++ application developers? How do they make their applications relevant in this new world? Is it all over? Do we throw away our C++ compilers and pick up a book on PHP?

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Google has their own browser!???

By Doug Schaefer

Apparently the word leaked on an unofficial Google blog site and they followed up with an "oops" official blog post. Either way, the word is out and the web browser "industry" is in for a shake up. Google is releasing their own web browser called Google Chrome. Apparently it includes pieces from Webkit (I'm guessing the browser part) and Firefox (I'm guessing the chrome part) and will be developed as an open source project.

The first beta will be released tomorrow (Tuesday). I've heard rumors but always dismissed them. Why would they do that when we have a handful of pretty good browsers already. I guess the rumors were true and given the beta comes out now, it's been in the works for a while.

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Android SDK goes beta

By Doug Schaefer

Well, if you follow the embedded industry even from a distance, the news that the Android SDK has gone beta is old news by now. I've been so busy p2-izing our upcoming Wind River products that I haven't had time to write here. Time to get my priorities straight :).

Any whoo, there's a lot of competition all of a sudden for mind share in the mobile Linux game. Android has been pretty quiet lately but they've clearly been busy beavers and a real Android-based device seems imminent, so it's time to take them seriously.

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LinuxHater, a touch of tough love

By Doug Schaefer

From now on, I defer all my opinions on the quality of the Linux desktop and the open source projects that work on it to this guy, the LinuxHater. I started reading this blog after I ran across this article on the 'Z' via the 'dot' written by a guy from Google. It really hits home what both of them have to say.

The hater shares some really honest opinions using some very colorful language (warning - if you're sensitive to that kind of thing) on everything from how hard it is for his grandmother to get into Linux, to how all the forking and duplication that's going on FOSS community is doing some serious harm to our ability to build up the Linux desktop to compete with Mac and Windows. It's a really funny read. And I have to agree with the Google guy. Given how much the hater knows about what he's writing about, he's really a Linux lover who desperately wants Linux to succeed but is loosing his cool in frustration.

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Android will be open source…eventually

By Doug Gaff

It's been a few months since the initial buzz of the Android SDK release, and the technology itself continues to look great. Ed Burnette recently posted a blog indicating Android will be 100% open source. In it he notes that Google says they fully intend to open up all of their code using appropriate open source licenses (including EPL!), but they're not yet ready because some of the API's aren't done. They're afraid of having to support bad API's forever. Yes, that sounds familiar, and of course the Eclipse response is: maybe if they opened up their API's, others could then help them evolve those API's to a point where the overall community was happy. We have provisional API's in Eclipse for exactly this reason. At a minimum, I wish Google would publish a timetable (gasp!) for getting this code opened up. Ed says Google will open (most) everything by the end of 2008. Please see the comments for details.

I want to revisit the two requests I made in my original post.

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Target Communication Framework (TCF)

By Martin Oberhuber

A year ago at EclipseCon, I've been asked a lot whether there wasn't a lightweight Open Source agent for resource-constrained communications with remote systems planned or available.

And now it's here - and much more! The Target Communication Framework (TCF) is not only an extendable agent, it's a whole protocol framework that has the potential to make target communications a lot easier. TCF is a new incubating component of the Eclipse Target Management Project, and its unique benefits include

• Transport-independent multiplexing of multiple services over a single protocol
• Ability to transparently add 3rd party value-adding services in the communication chain
• Auto-discovery and single setup of all target services.

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An Industry and Technology Revolution is on the Horizon

By Jason Whitmire

Limo, and in a slightly different way Android, have killed the standards-based approach to open source development in mobile. In the Linux world, creating an esoteric, theoretical application standard not based on market-driven code requires too much speculative investment without any clear mitigation of ROI risk for anyone to take up anymore. Indeed, the days of a bunch of representative techies flying to exotic locales to dream up the theoretical perfect system are over. It’s just too expensive to completely retool an entire stack without a known intrinsic return.

Because of the concentration in the mobile market (83% of handsets manufactured by five companies), when market leaders have invested in a stack, it is a standard whether certified by an arcane standards body or not.  The  Open Handset Alliance has created a de facto market standard not because a group of market leaders have adopted the standard, but because of Google’s overall singular market weight. The effect is the same (Trolltech and OpenMoko did the same thing that OHA did, and took it one step further by actually building a phone, but no one came running to embrace their reference designs because they lacked the market weight that Google has).

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Pointy Haired Boss: Open Source Software is Free!

By Doug Gaff

Today's Dilbert says it all.  There are far too many "free as in open, not free as in beer" blog posts for me to rehash this is great detail (wikipedia, my post).  But this comic reminds me of some simple truths:

• You can use open source software commercially or otherwise (subject to the license) and never contribute anything back.

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