July 24, 2009, 3:38 pm
LINUXDEVICES: In 1999 when you founded MontaVista, desktop Linux was in its infancy, the boom in Linux servers was still several years away, and the embedded world was devoted to real-time operating systems. What made you think Linux would be accepted or even work in the embedded world?
READY: No analysts were covering Linux at all back then. Red Hat was well known, but I think that like a third of the revenue came from selling T-shirts and stuff at Fry’s. Linux was considered to be very wacko and was derided as crazy. Bringing Linux to embedded was even crazier, people told me. It was way too big, way too slow, it was not real-time, and it was written by 16-year olds and Communists. But at Ready Systems, we were familiar with VRTX and the RTOS world, and customers kept asking for the RTOS kernel to have memory protection and to be POSIX-compliant. Essentially, they were asking us to make a real-time UNIX…
