Linux Driver

Professional Linux Driver

Agora Labs supports Linux and supplies an H.323 driver. Additionally, the Agora Labs' codecs are available ported to Linux.

Programmers working with the Linux operating system often refer to protocol stacks as drivers. Agora Labs provides a portation that enables engineers to create a loadable driver using their protocol stacks. With slight modification, this driver can also be used to create Unix drivers, or drivers for derivatives of the Unix OS, so that engineers can create Solaris drivers, HPUX drivers, BSD OS Drivers and other Unix drivers.

Production Quality Linux Driver

Agora Labs offers code that is fully tested--in their test lab, in professional test labs, and in the field. hey also use proprietary test methods and industry standard test suites. However, it is said that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Likewise, the proof of a protocol stack is in its interoperability. Agora Labs has a large number of customers, each deploying thousands of units in the field. And they work closely with their installed base of customers to keep their products up to date and interoperable.

Open Source Linux Drivers

Open source software is very appealing because at first it appears to be free. However there are hidden costs that only become apparent as your engineers get more deeply involved. A few of our prospects tried working with open source, only to find out that they spent well over 6 months working with it and still could not accomplish their goals with what was available. They then licensed one of our products and were able to get their project back on track, but in the process wasted a significant amount of market entry time and engineering resources.

Remember that the code is only about 20% of the programming part of a project. The other 80% is split between designing and debugging your product. And those numbers don’t include the marketing side of design, any learning or training that is needed, or the initial live testing, field testing, interoperability testing, certification testing, or customer testing that any communications product needs.

Open-source software is often just a few code modules. Our solutions includes much more than just the code. Some of the features we include are:

Support and Maintenance: Support is just a phone call or email away. You don't have to post to a forum and hope soeone answers your question.

Short Learning Curve: Agora's code is easy to port; its in both your and our best interests to enable you to use our code quickly, easily and with a minimum of support calls.
Common API: APIs for our features are as common as they can be. Compare this to open source, where the is no one authority to enforce commonality on all features' APIs. This makes your learning curve faster, and makes our code easier to use.
Documentation: Part of what you license from Agora is up-to-date, easily to read documentation.
Accountability: The President of Agora is readily available, and is concerned about each customer. Compare this to large companies, where the product-side of the business gets the lion's share of the president's attention. Of course, there is no one person who is accountable for open-source software. In fact, the open source licenses generally remove all accountability from the authors.
Warranty: Agora's code is warranteed to work correctly. What guarantee do you get with open source?
Indemnification: Agora's products are indemnified against copyright and patent infringement.
Confidentiality: Open Source code may drag some of your code into the public domain. Agora's licenses allow you to keep the code you have developed.
Testing: Agora tests thier code rigorously for correcct operation, and for resistance to expoits.
Size: Agora's code is significantly smaller than the competitions, and smaller than any open source stack we've seen. This means that you need less ROM and RAM, and can store a higher percentage of the code in your processor's cache, which means you get higher performance or lower battery drain.
Portability: Agora's products are designed to be ported to virtually any processor and OS. Its very difficult to make a stack designed for a single platform, like a PC, run on some other processor and OS.

And we help you discover the hidden costs of open-source.

The Cost of Open-Source

Only about 10% of an iceberg is visible; even less of the cost of Open Source software is apparent at first glance.

Some of the hidden costs of using open source:

The "open-source royalty”: Proprietary code is often smaller and faster than open-source code, and so requlres less processor resources and memory. The extra memory and processor power you may need for open source increases the cost of your product, just as a royalty does.
Initial and recurring engineering cost: You may pay a lot for proprietary software, but you will pay a lot in selecting, implementing, and debugging open source software, especially if you run into a problem that makes it out into the field.
Opportunity cost in time-to-profit: The cost of being late (or getting to market early) is not just the engineer-hours you save. Being the first to market gives your product an advantage in that you will sell it to more people (its the only choice until your competition feilds thier product), and your company will be generally be able to sell it for a higher price even after competing products are available.
Cost of hiring another expert when yours leaves: Agora will help your new engineers learn thier products if the original developer moves on to another project, or leaves the comany.
Cost of changing product: occasionally the open-source community abandons one package in favor of a newer, completely different package. And occasionally the open-source community redesigns the APIs so you have to change your code (e.g. Linux 2.4 to 2.6)
Legal Cost: Open Source advocates have sued users of open source software.
Investor loss: Some iInvestors often require a company to certify that no open source code has been used in their products.