Dan McDonald wrote:
>
> Sometimes it is really hard to convince management
> that they don't need an operating system for simple embedded
> work. For some reason they seem a whole lot more comfortable
> spending huge dollars on Wind River or whatever.
Just a philosophical note that...
Dan McDonald wrote:
> Sometimes it is really hard to convince management
> that they don't need an operating system for simple embedded
> work. For some reason they seem a whole lot more comfortable
> spending huge dollars on Wind River or whatever.
I've begun to think of WRS as the Microsoft of the
'Realtime' market.
The 'sales' pitch that is given to upper management(
and those are the first group contacted by WRS sales in
some cases...) byWRS sales folk follows the idea that
'well we (WRS) are there to support all problems that
come along, we (WRS) spend quite a bit of money to
have a large staff working on The Product, and therefore
you the customer can be assured that there will always
be support when you need it.' And to counter
the 'well what about Free Software X', the response
is something to the effect of 'well, do you want
your employees grinding their wheels in unsupported
software, software developed upon 'dubious' principles
etc.'...
Of course the reality is, and here I speak from long
experience doing BSP's for vxWorks, is that their
technical support can't really solve nasty show stoppers
all that quickly, if at all; And very often what is presented
as 'their driver/software' really was developed by a 3rd
party contractor, who having gotten their compensation,
may not be available to fix problems or analyze failure.
The turn around time from posting to say this group,
and someone in the world answering up often is far
quicker, far more detailed and effective than any amount
of 'paid' support subscription from WRS.
The fact that if I have a wyrd scheduling/interrupt/resource
utilization problem, and someone can direct me to the
section of the kernel to look at, is far superior than
the 'make a phone call/Wait/wait/Make another phone call/
wait/yell at 1st level tech support to get to manager to
get at 2nd level tech support, repeat until arriving to
a point where someone on the other side can understand
'the problem', and with unpublished source code, say,
'Oh, oops, that will be updated in the next release'...
and of course 'the next release' is when????
But 'Management' is often far more pusillanimous
about 'tech stuff' than say, floating checks to the
bank to keep the doors open...
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