The organisers of the Embedded Systems Conference held a "Disruption Zone" media breakfast today to showcase some of the disruptive companies presented at the show. The 7 year old start-up TimeSys was one of them. "What we do is to hunt and gather the key technologies from about 15 different sources (kernel.org, GNU tool chain, semiconductor companies providing patches to the kernel and from a repository of 1000 open source packages), and we build them and test them against real hardware back in Pittsburgh, in a factory in which we've invested over 1000 engineering months over the last 7 years", said Joseph Raffa, interim CEO (to be replaced next week).

Adding,

We're disruptive because we're exploiting three major discontinuities:
- open source (Linux, GNU...)
- the web as the primary delivery channel to serve embedded Linux, technologies and tools, to our customers via our service LinuxLink
- and automation and innovation around continuous gathering of Linux technologies, that we building and provision for 45 different microprocessors

After his presentation, I've talked with Raffa to figure why would companies with large internal development teams would choose TimeSys' solution versus doing it themselves or buying an embedded Linux version like Montavista or WindRiver. So here's what the interim CEO had to say about it.

The penetration of Linux in the embedded world is about 50 to 60%, coming from 0% ,5 or 6 years ago. But Linux is also very difficult to use in embedded applications because it was primarily designed for the enterprise. So re-purposing this code that was originally designed for the enterprise world to the embedded world is tricky because:
- the Linux kernel is changing 5 to 10 times everyday, and the components are also continuously changing
- the tool chains are changing and there are many inter-dependencies between the kernel itself, the various versions of tool chains for cross compilation on many of the different microprocessors, the patches that must be applies to the kernel that support these processors, and the 1000+ packages of open source for example in the Fedora core network that are available to embedded developers

So,

This is the nature of the complexity of using Linux in an embedded systems and this is why it takes 6 to 8 weeks for a Linux platform team to get a basic platform up and running and ready for their application developers.

And about TimeSys vs Montavista/WindRiver,

The established vendors are very highly motivated to release one binary that serves all the different microprocessors. It's in their economic interest. The trade-offs is their impact on time to market; it takes 12 to 18 months for a traditional software vendor to bring Linux innovations into market. When a new processor is developed, usually Linux is the first OS used to bring it up, that result in a patch that is sent to the open source world. And because of our deep relationships with the microprocessor vendors, we have access to these patches early, and when the chip is finally released we're ready to support them with our LinuxLynx.

And now you know ;-)