Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

......................... too onerous then this segment of their
market can very well bolt to the "free" and open source r-t systems.  On
the other hand we need to keep in mind that WRS wants to put vxWorks
into high volume items like cable modems and set top boxes and may not
really care about a few seats scattered about the national labs.

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Johnson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 12:22 PM
To: EPICS tech-talk
Subject: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme

This message is intended to provide some information and flag up a
warning about the new WRS 'Enterprise' software licensing model, which has an annual fee. I just read this in a message on the vxWorks mailing list:

They seemed to pitch it as a "rent the software" model -- that is, if
you bought a license this year, the software stopped working next

year.

In situations like mine, where single projects last 30+ years, this
could be prohibitive.

I don't know of any EPICS sites that have accepted the new license yet,
but there might be some; I do know that there have been questions about
it
from several sites. Here at APS we have looked at this license model,
but I'm not particularly happy with it myself - we're not sure that it's
going to save us any money, and it may end up costing more.

Note that WRS are shipping both the GNU and Diab C/C++ compilers in the Developers Toolkit that comes with the new license, but as far as I know

there's no guarantee that they will continue to use and support GNU in future vxWorks versions. The Diab compilers will almost certainly check

that you have a valid license before they'll run, whereas the GNU ones can't (thanks to the GPL), so there is probably some business incentive for WRS to drop GNU support (I am guessing at this though, I don't have any official information on it either way).

There also appear to be additional questions about the new vxWorks 6.0
OS, which apparently has a new TCP/IP network stack. Given the problems
that we had in switching from the vxWorks 5.3.x network stack to the newer
one in Tornado 2.x there may need to be changes to get EPICS to run on this version. Neither APS nor the LANL EPICS developers currently have seen vxWorks 6.0, and APS has no plans to move to this version in the next
few years at least - we might even consider switching to RTEMS and/or Linux rather than use vxWorks 6.0.

- Andrew

--
D. Peter Siddons
Bldg. 725D, NSLS
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Upton, NY 11976
USA.

References:

RE: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme Thompson, David H.

Navigate by Date:

Prev: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme Andrew Johnson

Next: RE: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme Thompson, David H.

Index: 1994  1995  1996  1997  1998  1999  2000  2001  2002  2003  <2004>  2005  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010  2011  2012  2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  2019  2020  2021  2022  2023  2024 

Navigate by Thread:

Prev: RE: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme Thompson, David H.

Next: Re: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme Zoltan Kakucs

Index: 1994  1995  1996  1997  1998  1999  2000  2001  2002  2003  <2004>  2005  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010  2011  2012  2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  2019  2020  2021  2022  2023  2024