Well, not necessarily Megazone. That's a grossly unfair characterization.
I know of a couple of very, very good real time embedded kernels you can buy
(which would count as "outsourcing OS components"), all of which simply blow
away home-grown stuff that most vendors are using. In fact, I've worked
with a couple of them on other projects, and one of them was so good that
I'd consider it pointless to try to "roll my own" today if I was doing such
a project, assuming I could negotiate a reasonable run-time per-license
royalty (I wasn't involved in that side of things).
Some of these include device support for Ethernet as well as file structures
on various types of physical devices (ie: flash cards, real disks,
battery-backed or "Zeropower" SRAM, etc)
Maligning someone for going to these folks for OS support is not only
inappropriate, it is slamming someone for making what, today, looks to me to
be a *good* decision.
---- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin http://www.mcs.net/ | T1's from $600 monthly / All Lines K56Flex/DOV | NEW! Corporate ISDN Prices dropped by up to 50%! Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| EXCLUSIVE NEW FEATURE ON ALL PERSONAL ACCOUNTS Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | *SPAMBLOCK* Technology now included at no cost - To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo@livingston.com' with 'unsubscribe portmaster-users' in the body of the message. Searchable list archive: <URL:http://www.livingston.com/Tech/archive/>