Commercialising Open Source Embedded systems you can trust! ERTOS - Commercialisation How To Commercialise Open Source? The ERTOS suite of software (including L4, Iguana, and Wombat) has been publicly released as open-source software (OSS) in November 2005, following earlier Beta releases. New public releases are made every three months, and the latest development versions can be obtained from the publicly accessible source repositories. The open-source model is in line with market trends away from royalties for operating systems, increases the credibility of the product, and eases uptake by companies whose products critically depend on the correct operation of the OS. These factors help us to establish our systems in the market place. The OSS approach does not preclude us from generating income from the commercial use of the software. The OS is at the heart of an embedded system that is expensive to develop and whose costs are dominated by software. Enlisting the help of the leading experts on the OS makes commercial sense, and we are presently engaged in a number of consulting relationships which help companies to deploy our software, while providing us with valuable feedback from users and help us to improve our offerings. Spinning Out Our initial commercial success is creating significant cash flow. At the same time the structure of NICTA and the limitations of its constitution does not provide enough flexibility (e.g. to quickly grow the development team) to ensure on-going commercial success. In order to avoid missing our window of opportunity for market dominance, it is necessary to move the commercialisation into an independent entity, i.e. a spin-out company. The spinout, to be created in the second half of 2006, will continue to work closely with ERTOS, feeding customer requirements back into research, and using the outputs of the on-going world-class ERTOS research to consolidate and extend the technical superiority of our products and out-innovate the competition. The present ERTOS research projects (seL4, L4.verified, Potoroo, and CAmkES) are of critical importance to this agenda. Who are our customers? Presently our software is making a significant impact in the area of wireless communication chipsets, such as those used in mobile phones. In November 2005 we announced the decision of leading CDMA chipmaker Qualcomm to use our software as the basis of the firmware for their mobile wireless 3G handset chipsets. We are working with a number of other large companies operating in this space and are negotiating with still more. We see an opportunity to establish the ERTOS OS suite as the industry standard OS for wireless mobile chipsets. We are also experiencing some initial success in other industry verticals, such as multi-media devices, and are negotiating with a number of RTOS vendors who see our technology as a chance to improve the attraction of their own offerings. This success is based on the unique combination of features of our software, most importantly an OS that provides the basis for safe and secure systems without compromising performance, which is of critical importance to battery-powered devices. Another important property is the ability of our virtualisation technology to shield customers' valuable IP rights from the viral nature of the GPL under which Linux is licensed.