Embedded developers ponder SCO threats

Almost 60 per cent of embedded systems developers are assessing their intellectual property risks as a direct result of SCO's lawsuit against IBM, according to a survey.

Nearly 240 of the 400 companies questioned by researchers Evans Data Corporation indicated that they will evaluate the intellectual property risks of Linux in light of the SCO lawsuit.

Use of Linux in embedded systems is patchy but growing. The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), established only last month, immediately gained wide support from Asian electronics giants.

But SCO is currently demanding $32 for a Linux licence per device, which it calls a 'promotional' price.

Among handset manufacturers Motorola, not a member of CELF, is one US company pushing Linux. But others favour Microsoft mobile operating systems, and in Europe firms like Nokia prefer the Symbian operating system.

The survey did not ask the developers what form an evaluation would take. But 34 per cent said that the task would fall to developers and engineering teams which had no legal expertise and preferred to focus on technical issues.

One in 10 indicated that they did not consider the intellectual property risks of using Linux at all.

But Gary Barnett, principal analyst at Ovum, suggested that licensing embedded systems is more complex than for servers.

"Most embedded systems don't use the features like non-uniform memory access that SCO is claiming to own. They only include what they need," he explained.

Apart from setting a user licence fee, SCO has said little about embedded Linux, and Barnett maintained that evaluating the risk does not mean that companies are worried.

Among other findings in the survey was a big jump from four to 10 per cent in the use of the Eclipse open source integrated development environment (IDE), submitted by IBM.

All the IDEs considered gained ground on Microsoft's dominant Visual Developer Studio IDE.

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