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I have no doubt that the subscribers are astutely correct.
The only thing that we can say for certain about, well, digital electronics in general, is that devices will keep getting smaller and more diverse. This is necessarily a world in which hardware must be redesigned to handle newer, smaller, less-power-consuming (etc.) requirements. That can mean new processors, new internal architectures, the works.
And, oh by the by, they all have to talk to each other, and to interact closely with each other.
So the one thing that it can't afford to do is to require a new operating-system. And it can't afford to "wait for" any operating-system vendor to "get around to" supporting it. (And it can't necessarily afford to pay for it, either, at least not during R&D.)
We can't afford to have device-W work in environment X built by vendor Y and to speak (proprietary) language Z. We don't have the time, the luxury, or the money. We need to be able to cross-platform develop all of the devices, basically from the very same source-code base, basically all at the same time.
Enter Linux. It's a completely open-source kernel that runs (today) on more than 24 architectures. It comes with a slew of open-source development tools. So, instead of duplicating all that has been done so-far, it leverages it. Even though vendors will continue to build proprietary elements on top of this foundation, the foundation itself is the essential part that can now remain the same.
There is simply no other way for things to get done. The OS cannot be the bottleneck.
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 07-06-2006 at 11:29 AM.
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