We are looking for very reliable freeware for the ARM7 microcontroller (NXP). The target application is for proffesional use which sets high requirements for reliability. The product is very cost-sensitive which has made us looking for freeware alternatives to the commercial/proffessional RTOS and TCP/IP stacks.
We are currently considering:
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Any comments on these ?
Does any of you know of other high quality freeware (preferably well documented) or maybe have some proffessional experience with some of the freeware sources available on the web ?
[1] Once you get down to the short list, the one with the best documentation is likely to be the highest quality as well. Not always, but that's the way to bet.
[2] Don't rule out commercial products. Look for something with a fixed fee for the system and no per-unit fee for the target systems. If your product is high volume the per-unit cost will be low. (and if you are making a low-volume cost-sensitive product, you aren't counting the development costs properly).
Be careful with the term "freeware", which is not very well defined, and covers a broad spectrum of zero purchase price licenses. What you are probably looking for is some sort of open source solution, and you should be aware that these often come with restrictions of some sort. For example, FreeRTOS is available as open source, but has the restriction that any changes you make to the FreeRTOS software must be made available to your customers (but not any software of your own, even if it is linked together). These are, of course, perfectly fair and reasonable terms, and there is also a commercial license available if you don't want to make your changes available (but of course, that costs money, albeit not much).
Open source is often the right choice, all other things being equal, but the main benefits are in the freedoms it gives you rather than the purchase cost price, and if you are just out looking for freebies, you've missed the point.
I haven't used either of these myself, but I've heard many good things about them. I've no reason to suspect they are not at least as good as any commercial alternatives with the same feature set. But again, you should chose these with the understanding of what the open source licenses give you, and what they ask of you.
As another poster has said, if your volumes are high (and if they are not, then why are you so price-conscious?), then many commercial systems have very low or free per-unit prices, and the cost of purchase can be considered part of the development costs. It's up to you to examine the choices, and consider the entire costs - if a commercial OS will save a month of a developers time, then it will quickly pay for itself. Of course, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that a given commercial tool *will* save you time - it could just as easily cost you more time.
Other things to look at are things like support (if you are not paying anything, you can't expect more than mailing-list support - but it can be far better to get good email answers directly from the developers and users than a badly implemented commercial support telephone hotline). Also look at installation (sometimes open source products require a bit more thought during installation, rather than a point-and-drool "wizard"), and installation licenses (with open source, you can install what you like, where you like - commercial systems often require battles with dongles, MAC addresses, registration, and so on). And with open source software, you don't need run-time licenses - even if a commercial system has very low costs for such licenses, management of them can be a bureaucratic complication.
There is lots of it out there, but most of it is released under GPL. This means that you will have to contact the originator to use it in commercial systems. Most of my releases are in portable standard C, and should port anywhere. See:
I am working on a project using FreeRTOS. I was exploring FreeRTOS + uip vs. RTX + TCP/IP (Keil). I got very nervous about the selection of the Ethernet controller, device drive and TCP/IP stack and was basically sold on going the commercial route for that reason. However, our requirement for Ethenet went away and we went with FreeRTOS. The key here is with what tools? We are using Eclipse + GNUARM + Cygwin succesfully but it was a bit of pain initially, but we are are comfortable with them now. If you can afford commercially supported tools for all of your developers don't hesitate to go that path. If you can't then that is a different issue. Cost was a huge issue for us.
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