Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Thompson, David H." <[email protected]> · Tue, 11 May 2004 17:05:49 -0400

We have something like that; it is a "VDT" license.  It is for a one
year term and has what looks like a low cost per seat.  You have to get
a minimum of 3 seats and that is the cost drawback.  It is more
expensive if you are only supporting one bsp but probably break even on
the annual maintenance if you have 3-4 architectures/BSPs.  You are not
spending the high initial dollars that WRS used to charge for a new
architecture.  It provides access to all of the architectures and BSPs
on the CD as well as the kernel source and TrueFFS.  Since we are
casting about for different platforms to support the MPS and other
systems it has been worth it for us.   The source license used to be on
the order of $100,000 so if you use that, even just a little, then you
would have your money's worth there.  I was also able to get a discount
by trading in some old seats from a license that is not being used
anymore.  I doubt if we will maintain this for very long, maybe only
three years, and then we will have to narrow down the list of boards
that we will keep on maintenance.

I think that WRS needs to hear from all of us what Andrew has to say
here, if the cost of a vxWorks license and the difficulty of the license
rules for using vxWorks get 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
-- 
Dear God, I didn't think orange went with purple until I saw
the sunset you made last night.  That was really cool. - Caro

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System