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Lynx Software Technologies is committed to open standards. POSIX®—an open standard based on UNIX operating systems and their APIs—brings a powerful set of features and capabilities to the table for embedded application development, resulting in benefits to software vendors including Lynx itself, its partners and its customers. The following list is a brief set of answers to the question “What are the benefits of POSIX” to our customers—the builders of complex safety- and security-critical embedded software systems.
ABOUT LYNX
Lynx Software Technologies is the premier Mission Critical Edge company that enables safe, secure and high-performance environments for global customers in the aerospace, military and federal markets. Since 1988, companies have trusted Lynx’s real-time operating system, virtualization and system certification experience, which uniquely enables mixed-criticality systems to be harnessed and deliver deterministic real-time performance and intelligent decision-making. Together with a growing set of technology partners, Lynx is realizing a new class of Mission Critical Edge systems that keep people and valuable data protected at every moment.
POSIX Helps to Avoid Vendor Lock-in
POSIX APIs are Valuable, Stable and Publicly Available
POSIX Tutorials & Examples Can be Easily Found Online
POSIX Increases the Number of Experienced Engineers that Can Work on Your Projects
POSIX improves Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Time-to-Market (TTM)
All the points we’ve discussed contribute to lowering your project’s development costs. Let’s review them in light of improving TCO and TTM.
improving TCO:
If you can avoid vendor lock-in by using POSIX, then you are not beholden to an OS vendor for your next project. That gives you the leverage when it comes time to negotiate your contract for the next project, not your OS vendor. If you had written your application with their proprietary APIs, then the OS vendor has the leverage—not you.
Likewise, many organizations underestimate the hidden cost of open-source software. Open-source software is anything but free. Frequently, the engineering cost of maintaining "free" software with the need to watch for patches, apply any newly found patches, and trying to get disinterested third-party developers to fix bugs, becomes too burdensome for their project. If you find that the TCO of an open-source OS is too high, then having written your applications with POSIX will enable you to more easily switch to a proprietary OS (where the support costs are built into the business model).
improving TTM:
With POSIX you are not dependent on any one entity to have thought of a comprehensive and robust set of application APIs. The POSIX standard is powerful and feature rich. Having a rich and well proven set of APIs will speed up development time, which, in turn, reduces engineering costs. Similarly, because POSIX has such a wealth of tutorials and examples on the Internet, if an engineer gets stuck on any particular problem, then he or she can turn to a vast pool of available resources to help solve the problem. This of course also reduces engineering time, which reduces cost.
POSIX can also allow you to staff your project more easily and in a shorter amount of time. This means you can start your project sooner—and perhaps with less expensive engineers, too.
A greater degree of freedom and flexibility to switch OSs and vendors at your discretion, free and easily accessible documentation, a vast knowledge base, boosted engineering expertise, and reduced TTM & TCO are why POSIX is so useful to builders of large and complex safety- and security-critical embedded systems.
Leveraging POSIX for Your Next Project