Linux Online - Linux in your living room

Linux in your living room


Publication:	siliconvalley.com	Date:	Jul 21 2003

Linux software has made good headway in undermining Microsoft in corporate networks. Now a Silicon Valley company believes Linux will do the same in the consumer electronics market. But here the incumbent isn't Microsoft. It's Alameda-based Wind River Systems, which has established itself over the past two decades as the leader in embedded software.

The challenger is MontaVista Software, based in Sunnyvale and formed in 1999 as the publisher of Linux software for the consumer-electronics, telecommunications and professional-developers markets. Could the same dynamics that are fueling Linux in corporations work in the consumer market?

Jim Ready, chief executive officer of MontaVista, is betting it will happen. And his company isn't one of the Linux fly-by-night operations that disappeared with the Internet bubble. MontaVista has raised $65 million from big companies like Intel, IBM, Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic, a division of Matsushita. Ready himself has worked in embedded software, the term for software that is the hidden brain in industrial and consumer gadgets, ever since he founded Ready Systems (first known as Hunter & Ready) in 1981. His firm's software served as the basis for Wind River's VxWorks embedded operating system, but Ready Systems ultimately didn't prosper as much as Wind River. Ready Systems merged with MicroTech Research and was subsequently sold to Mentor Graphics in 1995.