The inadvertent Linux user

Embedded Linux is on the rise, and may be found anywhere from the vehicle management system in your car to the smartphone in your shirt pocket. Montavista Linux, for instance, powers not only smartphones from Motorola, NEC and Panasonic, but Sony TV and media devices, Linksys wireless routers and Yamaha musical instrument systems.

Linux is deployed in more than 25 per cent of smartphones, and is second only in popularity to the Symbian operating system (OS) in that market. Experts are predicting a bright future for the OS, with ABI Research suggesting that it will appear on more than 200 million phones by 2012.

This may comes as a surprise to those who have observed the slow progress of Linux on the commercial and home user desktop, where Microsoft Windows is deeply entrenched, and any competing system has to overcome obstacles of perception and distribution. A Ubuntu desktop may or may not be easier to use, but the barriers to entry from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and end users are high. Change is perceived as risky, and users prefer to stay with what they know. Bill Gates once observed that, with each new release of Windows, "our biggest competitor is our installed user base."

A different ball game

The market for ubiquitous computing devices is very different. The OS is transparent and the user interface (UI) depends on a limited tool set. Manufacturers of mobile devices operate in a rapidly changing environment with short product life-cycles and shorter time-to-market. Last year's gizmo is already obsolete, and the margins are slim. The market is highly competitive, and every new product comes to market with a new range of features. Historically, each manufacturer relied on its own proprietary real time operating system (RTOS), which was costly and ultimately inflexible.

Both the market and the hardware are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with higher capacities of memory and processor power. Yet memory, battery life and processing power remain precious commodities. Linux may need more memory than a legacy RTOS system, but it is more scalable and parsimonious of RAM and flash than many of the systems with which it is in close competition. A Microsoft Windows Mobile system, for instance, requires 28-32 MB to be fully operational, whereas Linux can be deployed in less than a megabyte when necessary, and requires less than 11-12 MB to be highly functional, thus freeing memory for other uses and reducing the overall cost.

As in other sectors of the computer hardware industry, the manufacturers see direct benefits in supporting Linux and free software. If a company is giving away software that has brought it advantage, it is also gaining from the donations of its rivals.

Paradoxically, this willingness to collaborate encourages innovation in other aspects of the business. A new device can be brought to market much more quickly, and precious engineering resources are liberated to develop features further up the stack. Deploying Linux reduces the initial development costs, and perhaps more significantly, the absence of a licence fee significantly reduces the cost of each item sold, which is vitally important in a market where margins are slim.

Mutually-beneficial community ethos

In the true spirit of free software, pooling knowledge and resources on the technology and feeding back software changes to the community has been of mutual advantage to all the players. Sharing the technology has improved performance and reduced overall costs for everybody. No one company has had to recoup the vast expense of developing an enterprise-level OS from scratch. In general, embedded software companies have complied willingly with the terms of the General Public Licence (GPL), although there have been some minor instances of obfuscation and non-compliance.