Practitioner perceptions of Open Source software in the embedded systems area

There is a growing body of research to show that, with the advent of so-called professional Open Source, attitudes within many organisations towards adopting Open Source software have changed. However, there have been conflicting reports on the extent to which this is true of the embedded software systems sector—a large sector in Europe. This paper reports on attitudes towards Open Source software within that sector. Our results show a high level of acceptance of Open Source products with large, well established communities, and not only at the level of the operating system. Control over the software is seen as fundamentally important. Other key perceptions with Open Source are an easing of long-term maintenance problems and ready availability of support. The classical strengths of Open Source, namely mass inspection, ease of conducting trials, longevity and source code access for debugging, were at the forefront of thinking. However, there was an acknowledgement that more guidelines are needed for assessing Open Source software and incorporating it into products.