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Argument
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Counter-argument when using FreeRTOS
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| "Open source software is badly supported" | FreeRTOS has an active and free support forum. It is also possible to obtain commercial support from a large engineering company - providing choice and complete piece of mind. |
| "Incorporating open source means you risk having to open source your entire application" | FreeRTOS is licensed such that only the kernel is open source. Application code that uses the kernel can remain closed source and proprietary - provided the functionality it provides is distinct from that provided by the kernel itself. |
| "Open source software ends up costing much more (the total cost of ownership argument)" | FreeRTOS is completely free to download, experiment with and deploy. Each port comes with a pre-configured demo application to ensure you start with a known good and working project that can then be tailored to meet your needs - getting you up and running very quickly. Should at some point you require commercial licensing or support then packages are available at very competitive prices, so you have nothing to loose and everything to gain. |
| "Open source software is badly written" | FreeRTOS is commercial grade, stable and reliable. There are even safety critical versions based on it, with improvements from the safety critical certification being fed back into the open source code base (although not the new safety related features). |
| "Open source code becomes fragmented, with many different versions available" | The FreeRTOS release procedure is very tightly controlled with all official ports being updated simultaneously. Current and past releases are available in .zip files. The head revision is available from a publicly accessible SVN repository. Naturally, occasionally errors are made, but these are quickly spotted by the large user base (more than 6000 downloads per month [very conservative figure given]) and are documented as soon as they are brought to our attention. |
| "Use of open source code leaves you at risk of IP infringement" | Only code of known origin is included in official versions. If you are still concerned about IP infringement, purchase a commercial license to receive standard indemnification. |
| "Open source projects have no longevity" | Neither do some commercial products! There are numerous commercial products that are no longer available, if these had been open source at least users would have the source and could continue to use the tool. FreeRTOS has been around for more than 6 years already, and is going very strong! |