The Missing Elephant
It seemed that each Disruption Zone presentation included a slide or two describing how the small company owned a key patent or technology that gave them control over their market niche. VCs love vendor lock-in and favor companies with strong patents, perhaps because they can still make money though licensing even if the company goes under.
As a result, not one mention of open source or free software occurred during the entire lunch. In particular, the VC slides on embedded operating systems completely omitted Linux. As nearly as I can tell, these VCs have decided there's no way to make money from cottage industries using software anybody else can distribute.
A show-floor panel discussion on "The End of Embedded Linux?" provided some interesting data points based on a survey of North American developers by Embedded Systems Design (another CMP magazine). As nearly as I can make out, 45 percent of deployed operating systems are various flavors of Linux, Windows CE, and Windriver's VxWorks. The trend lines indicate that in a few years the choices will be Linux, WinCE, and debris.
The discussion's deliberately inflammatory title came from the year-to-year trend line for Linux usage, which was downward, in contrast to its previous upward slope. Bill Gatliff noted that most embedded Linux developers don't read trade magazines and probably don't bother with surveys. The audience seemed to agree with his assessment.
I'd wondered about that, because none of the measurements have error bars or confidence limits. That's understandable, given the nature of an online survey, but it certainly means the results don't have many significant figures.
I checked a different survey performed by linuxdevices.com that wasn't mentioned at the panel. According to that survey, Linux accounts for nearly half the market and shows strong year-to-year growth. Got that?
Regardless of the details, somewhere around a third of the embedded OS market uses Linux. Any VC in the field with any interest in software should have that up on a slide somewhere, I'd say. Perhaps it was there and I simply missed it amid all the talk of patent holdings and market control?
