VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme

[Andrew Johnson <anj@aps.anl.gov>]

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
--
Dear God, I didn't think orange went with purple until I saw
the sunset you made last night.  That was really cool. - Caro