Systems software technology and business
In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary [...]
Here’s two interesting tables
Percentage of lock acquisitions for global TCP/IP locks that do not succeed
immediately.
OS Type
6 conns
192 conns
16384 conns
MsgP
89
100
100
ConnP-L(4)
60
56
52
ConnP-L(8)
51
30
26
ConnP-L(16)
49
18
14
ConnP-L(32)
41
10
7
ConnP-L(64)
[...]
Imagine that you release software under a license that is primarily concerned with making sure that modifiable source code is available to all and that no restrictions should ever be placed on derived works. Now imagine that someone takes a huge body of code like this and starts marking interfaces as limited to specific uses [...]
The RTLinux* Manifesto was published a little over 10 years ago at the 5th Linux Expo in Raleigh North Carolina which was really the first one with a bunch of suits wandering around. As a kind of celebration/experiment , I’m publishing an annotated version.
Here is a related discussion
.
* RTLnux is a trademark now belonging to [...]
Recursive transducers.
I have a blog post up at fsmlabs.com about our TimeKeeper software for time synchronization. TimeKeeper is currently aimed at financial trading markets, but we also hope to market it to electric power distribution and transmission engineers who have a similar need for precise time synchronization within substations and for instrumentation. There are also applications [...]
The ALMA team has released ACS 8.0 on Red Hat 4.4, downgrading the Linux version from the foreseen 5.2 version. This choice, with the consequent back-porting of the code to the older OS version, had to be taken because of major problems encountered by the Control and Correlator teams in porting RTAI real time code [...]
Bill “Linux Pundit” Weinberg explains:
Business Model and Execution: Many MontaVista watchers have argued that the company’s business model was essentially flawed. [...] Such a model based on building with and for open source can devolve into less attractive high-overhead packaged service business in the face of a rising value line.
[...] The model did not fail [...]
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – 11/10/09) – Cavium Networks (NASDAQ:CAVM – News), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, wireless, storage and video applications, today announced that it is has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MontaVista Software for $50 million, comprised of approximately $16 million in cash [...]
The goal of modern processor chip design has changed from optimizing various speed/price/heat tradeoffs for applications to finding excuses for dumping more transistors into the device. Heard an interesting talk from Krisztián Flautner of ARM at the ACISC conference and I have to admit that it’s not entirely the fault of the chip designers – [...]