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<== Date ==> <== Thread ==>

Subject: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme
From: Andrew Johnson <[email protected]>
To: EPICS tech-talk <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 11:21:46 -0500
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


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