An Electronic Design article talks about the growing popularity of Open Source and Free Software that is begining to displace old-style proprietary tools in the embedded design market. The higher quality and lower cost of Free Software is leading to increasing use of the Linux 2.6 kernel in both MMU and MMU-less microcontrollers as well as in RTOS markets. And the release of the Eclipse 3.0 IDE has led to a number of manufacturers standardizing on Eclipse-derived development tools, such as the TI Code Composer Essentials. And, of course, there's the GCC compiler family and the GDB debugger.