Dates and Events: |
OSADL Articles:
2023-11-12 12:00
Open Source License Obligations Checklists even better now
Import the checklists to other tools, create context diffs and merged lists
2022-07-11 12:00
Call for participation in phase #4 of Open Source OPC UA open62541 support project
Letter of Intent fulfills wish list from recent survey
2022-01-13 12:00
Phase #3 of OSADL project on OPC UA PubSub over TSN successfully completed
Another important milestone on the way to interoperable Open Source real-time Ethernet has been reached
2021-02-09 12:00
Open Source OPC UA PubSub over TSN project phase #3 launched
Letter of Intent with call for participation is now available |
COOL - Compact OSADL Online Lectures - January 2025 edition
Embedded Linux distributions
Results of the online "wish list"
The survey
The survey was started on beginning of July 2022 and ended in the first days of October 2022 when the final participant submitted his vote. The questionnaire remained open, but was no longer used.
The participants
A total of 53 volunteers took the time to complete the questionnaire, thanks a lot to all of them!
The results: 1. Ranking of the requirements
Requirement | Result | Score |
|---|---|---|
1a. Software development | ||
Low memory footprint | 3.17 | |
Hardware virtualization | 2.60 | |
Containers such as LXC | 3.26 | |
Currently unsupported hardware | 3.17 | |
Merging off-tree drivers to mainline | 3.15 | |
Cloud connectivity | 3.38 | |
| ||
1b. Software management | ||
Life cycle of more than 10 years | 3.87 | 3 |
Security updates | 4.47 | 1 |
Continuous integration | 3.70 | |
License compliance | 4.15 | 2 |
The results: 2. Ranking of the distributions or distribution generators in use
Distro | Result | Score |
|---|---|---|
Debian | 18.64% | 2 |
Ubuntu core | 9.38% | 3 |
Yocto/Debian | 9.04% | |
Yocto/Poky | 36.83% | 1 |
Elbe | 8.55% | |
Isar | 1.89% | |
PTXdist | 3.11% | |
Other | 5.13% |
Conclusion
A future OSADL project to improve Embedded Linux distributions should take care of security updates, license compliance and extended support life cycle. And this should be done primarily for Yocto and Debian. Since license compliance may be easier to obtain than security updates and extended life cycle, a possible project could focus on license compliance of Yocto. Such project could, for example, add scanning functionality to get a list of all and not only one license per package and to provide complete lists of copyright notices instead of none. In addition, text generators could be added to provide appropriate texts that must be delivered along with the product. However, we must keep in mind that these results – although very plausible – have a very weak empirical basis, as only 53 volunteers participated in the survey. How naive we were to expect between 500 and 1000 responses!
Possible next step
A next step could be to describe a related Yocto licensing improvement project, to estimate the required funding and to set up an OSADL Letter of Intent as was done before for other projects. If (or should we say "when"?) the estimated funding threshold is reached, the service providers that will have been contacted in advance are engaged, and the work begins.
