2. RTEMS Project Mission Statement — RTEMS Software Engineering 5.4-rc2 (21st August 2026) documentation

# 2. RTEMS Project Mission Statement

RTEMS development done under the umbrella of the RTEMS Project aims to provide a free and open real-time operating system targeted towards deeply embedded systems which is competitive with proprietary products. The RTEMS Project encourages the support and use of standard APIs in order to promote application portability and ease porting other packages to the RTEMS environment.

The RTEMS development effort uses an open development environment in which all users collaborate to improve RTEMS. The RTEMS cross development tool suite is based upon the free GNU tools and the open source standard C library newlib. RTEMS supports many host platforms and target architectures.

## 2.1. Free Software Project

The free software goals of the project are:

- RTEMS and supporting components are available under various free licenses with copyrights being held by individual authors.

- All software which executes on the target will not place undue restrictions on embedded applications. See also Licensing Requirements.

- Patches must be legally acceptable for inclusion into the RTEMS Project or the specific project being used.

## 2.2. Design and Development Goals

- Source based development with all users building from source

- Any suitable host should be supported

- Open testing, tests and test results

- Ports to new architectures and CPU models

- Addition of Board Support Packages for available hardware

- Improved runtime libraries

- Faster debug cycle

- Various other infrastructure improvements

## 2.3. Open Development Environment

- Encourage cooperation and communication between developers

- Work more closely with “consumers”

- Code available to everyone at any time, and everyone is welcome to participate in development

- Patches will be considered equally based on their technical merits

- All individuals and companies are welcome to contribute as long as they accept the ground rules

- Open mailing lists

- Developer friendly tools and procedures with a focus on keeping them current

- Conflicts of interest exist for many RTEMS developers. The developers contributing to the RTEMS Project must put the interests of the RTEMS Project first.