List,
this is perhaps interesting.
/Klaus
<quote> Embedded Systems Design's annual survey of embedded systems developers finds that around 28 percent of all embedded systems currently under development will have no operating system (OS), and this absence is especially prominent among developers of consumer, automotive, and industrial electronics; conversely, computer peripherals are most likely to feature OSes. A lack of need was the top reason provided by respondents for not including an OS, followed by the pressure an OS would put on the system's processor and/or RAM, cost, and difficulty of use. According to the poll, OSes are more likely to appear in products at larger companies than at smaller companies, while more experienced developers tend to use an OS in the current project. Of the respondents who do use an OS, 51 percent employ a commercial, off-the-shelf system; 21 percent use a proprietary, in-house, or internally developed OS; 16 percent use an open-source OS; and 11.8 percent use a commercial Linux distribution. From these findings, it can be surmised that the popularity of commercial OSes is growing dramatically, and that such OSes are taking the place of in-house OSes. Developers who opted for a commercially available OS said the choice of OS was most heavily influenced by the software staff, although the software manager also ranked highly as a decision maker. Top-ranking criteria for assessing OSes include real-time performance, processor support, software tool availability, a lack of royalties, cost, memory footprint, simplicity, and middleware availability. The survey indicates a precipitous drop in commercial and noncommercial distributions of open-source OS usage over the last year, with poor performance and/or real-time capability, support concerns, memory usage, legal ambiguousness, the state of development tools, and price cited as reasons for the decline. Over 36 percent of respondents said they would use a different OS in future projects than the one they currently use, while around 63 percent said they would keep using the same OS. </quote>
http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187203732