Will It Fly? Working toward Embedded Linux Standards: theELC's Unified Specification Plan

When more than 50 of the world's leading Linux managers and executives found their way to an organizing meeting at Chicago's Embedded Systems Conference in March 2000, they voted nearly unanimously to form the Embedded Linux Consortium as a promotional organization, specifically excluding standards activity from the initial mission.

Only 13 months later, the promotional organization's Board of Directors announced an initiative whose goal is a specification for a single unified embedded platform (read the press release at http://www.embedded-linux.org/). The ELC's governors asked the membership to support a program of standardization that will lead to a platform specification consisting of a set of APIs for embedded Linux distributions. Designers everywhere will be able to rely upon the specification and certify their products against it using test suites. A glossary (see Sidebar) brings to life the vision and constituent parts of the specification.

ELC Platform Specification Glossary

Inder Singh at the Linux Consortium Meeting

ELC Board Ponders

Audience at Linux Consortium Meeting

Scott McNeil of the Free Standards Group (left) and James DeReave of the Open Group (right)

The chief benefit will be interoperability. Put another, perhaps more tantalizing way, the threat of fragmentation will no longer be much of an issue, enabling Linux to compete much more successfully for the anticipated vast supply of embedded applications.

``Will it fly?'' is a key question being asked in various quarters. ``Is it open?'' is heard nearly as often. In the weeks since the idea was announced and debated at a well-attended (and highly supportive) meeting on the eve of San Francisco's Embedded Systems Conference 2001, progress has been made on answers and on procedures to move forward. If you are developing embedded Linux products, you'll want to track this, perhaps even participate. You do not have to be a member of the Embedded Linux Consortium to get involved.

After debating the time and effort required to change its bylaws, and the desirability of creating yet another standards organization, the Embedded Linux Consortium's Board, which includes managers and executives from Lineo, Red Hat, IBM, MontaVista and LynuxWorks, decided that the ELC would remain a promotion-centric organization and work with an existing standards organization. To this end, the ELC is actively seeking an outsource partner to handle the infrastructure needed for standardization committees and due-process procedures as well as test and conformance centers of competence. The group is counting on its ability to build a bankable brand so that it can structure marketing and promotion (under existing bylaws) around standardization in the hands of a respected partner. So far, The Open Group, Free Standards Group and EEMBC Certification Laboratories (ECL) have stepped into the outsource ring as worthy choices (see sidebar).

Possible Outsource Partners

After a period of interactive proposal building and evaluation, the ELC's Board plans to announce its partner selection, probably by late summer. An initial draft specification may be ready around the same time, more as a list of ingredients and objectives for committee work than a design-worthy proposal.

From a historical perspective, a successful ELC Platform Specification will be the first time in more than 25 years that the embedded industry has been able to marshal resources to construct a common platform, making the proposal a possible watershed event.

Although the ELC Board is collectively the prime mover behind this effort, board members maintain their marching order represents a very broad cross section of the membership, which totals more than 120 corporations and individuals around the globe. Rather than being the brainchild of a handful, the ELC maintains, ``our members asked us to do this.'' And, the group intends to follow an open process involving the ELC membership as well as the broader Linux community.

By outsourcing to a respected standards organization, the ELC expects the effort to act as a magnet, attracting many companies and individuals for whom marketing and promotion, and thus membership, in the ELC is not important. Inquiries are coming in, for example, from large contract software development organizations that occupy a very early position in a supply chain that ends with household-word company names. This kind of participant wants to see the word Standards above the door first and Open second. Marketing and promotion is the business of their customer's customer, not them.