With the availability of open source products why would you decide to license proprietary embedded software for your next project?
Well, everyone’s situation is different but here are a few things to keep in mind. In many cases it is much more economical, more efficient, lower risk, and simply a good business decision to pursue a proven, supported platform from Embedded Access. |
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What differentiates your products from your competitors’ products? Quite likely it isn’t the particular platform you use or the low level drivers utilized. So if most of the value you offer is based on the product features and performance of the application layer, why would you assign your engineers who know more about the key differentiators of your product than anyone to tasks outside of these differentiators? Taking time to port an open source driver is reducing the time available for increasing the value proposition of your products. |
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All software products from Embedded Access are economical and are licensed royalty free. That means that after the up front license fee covering either a single end product, a family of end products, or multiple product families you decide to make, there are no follow on per unit fees. The average license fee for one of our embedded software products is equivalent to 3 - 4 man-weeks of effort using standard developer salaries and modest over heads. Each of our products are based on many man-years of development resulting in an excellent return on your investment. |
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All software products from Embedded Access are supported by a team of developers with in depth knowledge of the products. This means that you have the comfort of knowing that your questions will be answered by a specialist in a timely manner. This can avoid the risk of a developer having to do a deep level investigation at a critical point in your schedule and potentially holding up your project. Missing shipment dates and customer deadlines are extremely expensive! |
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All software products from Embedded Access are maintained to ensure compatibility with the latest hardware. Protocol specifications evolve and hardware performance can change given the larger speeds and capacities achieved by newer components. With the constant evolution of hardware, it’s comforting to know that our products will be maintained to support the latest CPUs, controllers, and peripherals such as USB Memory sticks. |
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Open Source solutions are not optimized for embedded systems and have legal issues. Typical open source solutions are ported from desktop software and consequently do not offer hard real-time performance, require much more memory, and often require a more expensive CPU to provide acceptable performance. As well, you need to carefully consider the GPL licensing aspects given the lack of indemnification from patent violations, return of modifications, etc. If you internally modify the open source code to improve performance or compatability, then this only increases the amount of code that must be developed under your internal development proceedures leading to higher costs and a longer schedule. Consider the total costs of ownership! |
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Engineering services are available for customizations at reasonable rates. At Embedded Access we believe that strong support services go hand in hand with reliable products. Should you want to add a feature or integrate custom hardware we are available to provide engineering services work at competitive rates. |
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