On May 19, 2005, at 3:37 PM, Linas Vepstas wrote:
:-/ I was once very disatisfied with an earlier job I had because the boss kept trying to make me use a "rabbitcore" which had only 1MB for everything, and there was no way I'd be able to fit Linux into that.
People understand the trade off of the need for resources to get the features they want, which is why they choose Linux in the first place. Yes, sometimes people ask for what seems to be unreasonable in such products, but it also forces us to be clever about how we configure the systems.
The difficult trade off is when some states they get the same feature set with one particular piece of software as they do with Linux, but in much less space. The advantage of Linux is open source and no royalties, but many of the RTOS systems these days no longer have royalties, just a one time up front cost. When they weigh that against the extra cost of memory for Linux and the number of systems, the Linux "royalty" is more than the purchase of the competing OS. It's really happening that way today.
Thanks.
-- Dan