Re: VxWorks 6.0 and Enterprise licensing scheme

["D. Peter Siddons" <siddons@bnl.gov>]

Hi David,
   I think this is exactly the point; we are small fry and they don't 
really care if they lose us. This is the root cause of all our 
complaints, I suspect. So, lets jump :)
Pete.


Thompson, David H. wrote:
> ......................... 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:anj@aps.anl.gov] 
> 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

--
D. Peter Siddons
Bldg. 725D, NSLS
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Upton, NY 11976
USA.

Email: siddons@bnl.gov