LinuxDevices.com talks to Inder Singh, Chairman of LynuxWorks,
about recent layoffs at his company. Other interesting information
includes a look at the general health of the embedded market: QNX
appears to be a rare exception to the hard times all around the
embedded space:
“In response to recent rumors of a substantial layoff
at Embedded Linux vendor LynuxWorks, LinuxDevices.com contacted the
company for comment. LynuxWorks Chairman Inder Singh acknowledged a
recent layoff at his company, putting its size at “approximately 15
percent of the company’s work force.”Additionally, Singh strongly disputed rumors that LynuxWorks —
which sells both BlueCat Embedded Linux and a proprietary real-time
operating system (RTOS) called LynxOS — has virtually eliminated
all of their BlueCat Linux developers. “We continue to have a
robust development program on our Linux side,” he said. “You’ll see
a whole series of Linux product announcements coming out between
now and the end of the year.”According to Singh, LynuxWorks has experienced much more of a
decline in services income than in product revenue this year.
“Customers have been moving to in-house development and away from
outside services due to the economic slowdown,” said Singh. “Right
now, there’s more of a tendency to download the latest Linux from
the web, and purchase our tools as a way to help with the actual
embedded system implementation.” LynuxWorks recently announced
tools support for other companies’ Linux distributions, including
those of Red Hat, SuSE, and Debian in addition to its own BlueCat
distribution.”