It's very interesting to read about Rob's experiences. I had a similar (ish) experience working at a startup that was in way over its head making hardware. I

It's very interesting to read about Rob's experiences. I had a similar (ish) experience working at a startup that was in way over its head making hardware. I got out earlier than he did (I only lasted a few months). My only advice is that if you're working at a startup and you don't have confidence in the management, definitely get out. I also worked at a very well-run company (Laurel Networks) that also sold an appliance running embedded Linux in the early 2000s. We basically shipped a modified Red Hat 9. I was on the OS team. Our main concern was making sure no unnecessary ports were exposed or services running. We didn't have quite the same focus on creating the absolute minimum OS image size since our product included a hard disk. We had similar concerns with providing a seamless (and secure) upgrade path. I think disk size is not that important in embedded Linux any more. If you're shipping a router that has its OS on a read-only compact flash card, you'll struggle to even find a CF card under 32 MB these days. They just don't manufacture them. So there's not much incentive to squeeze things on to a floppy disk any more. Microcontrollers still exist out there, but they don't run Linux (or usually any OS)-- usually they're just a "for" loop on bare metal. On the other hand, minimizing the amount of code you're running is as important as ever. The more code you're running, the bigger the attack surface is. I hope that the Toybox project gains some traction out there as an option for folks that need it.