Red Hat, a leader in open source Internet infrastructure solutions, and NetSilicon, a leader in networked microprocessing solutions, have announced a partnership to deliver open source products and services that accelerate time-to-market for manufacturers of Ethernet and Internet-attached devices.
Under the terms of this agreement, Red Hat will provide engineering services to NetSilicon and ongoing support to NetSilicon customers. The first product from this partnership is NET+Lx, a development platform for Internet appliances, running uClinux, which was ported by Red Hat to NetSilicon's NET+ARM processor. The product was displayed by Red Hat the Embedded Systems Conference. Said Cornelius Peterson, President and CEO, NetSilicon. "The next wave of computing is happening at the device level. With the availability of tightly coupled software and silicon solutions, the intelligent device market will soon dwarf the desktop and server markets in annual units shipped."
NetSilicon's NET+ARM processor has been developed specifically for embedded networking applications and is used by more than 250 customers worldwide, said Peterson. He continued, "Combining the strengths of Red Hat in open source, GNU, Linux, realtime and worldwide support with the proven NET+ARM family of networked microprocessors provides our mutual customers with an out-of-the-box environment to rapidly develop Internet-attached devices."
Michael Tiemann, Chief Technical Officer, Red Hat, said: "As embedded devices become more ubiquitous, it is exactly this kind of prowess and creativity combined with the unique benefits of open source software that will drive the next generation of computing." uClinux is a version of the Linux operating system that runs on processors with no MMU (memory management unit). It supports a variety of open source applications including webservers, mail clients and ftp clients. uClinux also supports the EL/IX applications programming interface (API). This provides for quick and easy porting of POSIX compliant applications to NET+Lx software and NET+ARM hardware.
According to NetSilicon, IDC research has stated that paid Linux shipments grew faster than any other server operating system over the past two years and their preliminary figures for 1999 show Linux shipments hold 24,6% of the server operating system market, up from 15,8 in 1998. IDC also states that Red Hat holds 50,2% of Linux vendor market share and that Red Hat Linux is the most popular distribution, preferred by 68,7% of US Linux users. IDC predicts that, by 2002, there will be more than 55 million handheld and notebook-style information appliance devices and, that by 2005, shipments of these appliances will exceed shipments of PCs.
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