RTEMS Support Services

[Joel Sherrill]

Hi,

I thought with the discussion of improvements
to RTEMS that requires touching every BSP,
it would be a good time to remind everyone
that this type of maintenance activity is
paid for by a combination of

+ RTEMS Support Contracts (RSC)
+ RTEMS Application Assistance (RAA)
+ RTEMS Directed Development (RDD).
+ RTEMS application development

RSC follows the traditional support model
for free software.  OAR provides timely
responses to questions and problems you
encounter.

With RAA, OAR becomes an extended part of
your team.  We are on-call to help you
with whatever issue arises in your application.
For example, we may help with application
design, application code reviews, or tuning.

With RDD, you are directly sponsoring improvements
to a specific area of RTEMS that you choose.  Examples
of this type of activity have included algorithmic
improvements, file system improvements, API additions,
size improvements, tool improvements, and improvements
in the test suites.  Basically if it is on the wish
list, you are just making sure the right engineers are
getting to pay attention to it now and full time.

I can't encourage you all enough to consider RTEMs
support services.  We are tidying up RTEMS 4.8.0
now and that takes effort to do right.  With your
assistance, RTEMS 4.9.0 could be done next summer
with another set of impressive improvements. But
that takes engineering time.

I hate to post a marketing pitch to the mailing
lists but everyone needs to remember that if you
want myself and other core RTEMS developers to
work full-time on RTEMS, this is what it takes.

Thanks and remember RTEMS in your budget plans.

--joel