Compatibility and Standards Issues

The term compatibility has been widely misused, OS's claiming to be 'compatible' as such - without stating to what they are compatible. So first a clarification as to how this term is being used here. Compatibility between embedded OS and desk-top development systems is one aspect here, this compatibility being on the hardware and on the software level, as well as on the administrative level. Beyond that level of compatibility there is also a conceptual compatibility, which is of importance not only for the development, but also to an even higher degree, for the evaluation of systems. The compatibility of embedded Linux to desk-top development systems as understood here, is defined as the ability to move executables and concepts from the one to the other without requiring any changes. This does not mean that some changes might then be made for optimization reasons but there is no principle demand for such changes. As an example one might consider a binary that executes on the desk-top and the embedded system unmodified, but in practice would be put on the embedded system in a stripped version - this is no conceptual change though.