About Pengutronix

Pengutronix was founded in 2001 as one of the first embedded Linux companies in Germany and provides professional services for the use of Linux in industrial applications.

Our employees are experienced Linux developers. We focus on the operating system, the part of the software stack above the hardware and below our customers’ applications.

In these areas, we support our customers with consulting, training and development services.

Long-Term Open Source Strategy

In industrial markets, open-source software is a non-differentiating part of devices:

While vendors require a bug-free and performant platform for their products, this platform does not constitute a unique selling point. At the same time, the complexity of modern systems makes global, community-based collaborative development of the operating system platform economically attractive.

The GPLv2 license of the Linux kernel is a notable reason why the collaboration of experts in the Linux community works so efficiently: it forces the market participants to release improvements to the kernel so that most of the improvements are contributed to the upstream project by the authors or other community members and are available for use by everyone.

Pengutronix has been pursuing a “Mainline First” strategy for a long time: the goal is always to avoid accumulating the required changes in each customer project over a long time, but to contribute them as soon as possible to the mainline kernel. This has the advantage for the customer that “technical debt” is reduced and the high quality level known in the Linux kernel can be achieved through the review in the community. In the longer term, the mainline kernel is improved to natively support the customer’s hardware, keeping maintenance costs low during the long industrial product support periods.