Pontedera, July 13, 2007

Title: A business model based on Open Source software

Speaker: Dr. Paolo Gai, Evidence Srl

When: Friday July, 13th 14.00

Where: Sala Seminari Ovest, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy

University of Pisa - On the 13rd of July in occasion of the seminar "A business model based on Open Source software" the Evidence CEO, Paolo Gai, will present a speech describing the newest Evidence results in the development of open-source software based on ERIKA Enterprise and Linux.

Since 2002, Dr.Paolo Gai is CEO of Evidence Srl, an Italian software company born as spin-off of the ReTiS Lab of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna.

Evidence is an example of company partially making its business on Open Source projects. The mission of the company is to bring innovative and Open Source solutions to the industrial world.

Very recently, Evidence has released his real-time operating system Erika Enterprise under the GPL license for research and non-commercial purposes.

This way, the research communities can freely use a modern and innovative real-time operating system for their research on embedded systems and sensor networks.

This operating system supports the AVR processor, thus it can be used as a substitute of tinyOS in sensor networks.

However, Erika has some features that cannot be found in tinyOS: preemptive multitasking, OSEK standard interface, support for several architectures, multicore support, advanced scheduling algorithms, and standard C programming.

During the seminar, these further topics will be discussed:

• FLEX, a small, flexible and cheap embedded board based on the DSPic microcontroller and supported by the Erika operating system.
  
• Evelin SDK, a development tool for embedded Linux boards, based on Open Source projects (i.e., Scratchbox, Maemo, Laika, Eclipse, DirectFB and GTK).
• Evelin Linux distributions for embedded boards, containing the boot-loader U-Boot, the Linux kernel and a set of Open Source applications. 
• Help to companies that want to move from proprietary solutions to cheaper Linux solutions.
  

During the seminar, Dr.Gai will discuss the business model of the company and will show the most recent products based on Open Source software.
 

About Evidence S.r.l.

Evidence Srl is a spin-off company of the ReTiS Lab of the Scuola S. Anna. It was founded end of 2002 by a group of academics experts in the field of real-time and control systems. The mission of Evidence is to provide customers with innovative solutions that can help designing and building embedded devices, especially targeted to future market trends characterized by tight application requirements and fast time to market.