Wind River, the world’s #1 embedded software company, moved two steps closer to Linux today, with a pair of announcements that it has joined two key organizations: the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Eclipse Consortium. This follows an October Linux tools announcement which it called “just the first step.”
Wind River Edges Closer to Linux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Oh yeah, didn’t they own FreeBSD (or was it BSD/OS) at some point? If so, why are they moving their entire operation to Linux. You would think they would have enough of a BSD base to keep rolling from that. Inquiring minds want to know!
They owned BSD/OS, the commercial BSD variant, but stopped some time ago (I guess there is no competition possible when free BSD’s are available that are at least as capable as the commercial BSD/OS!). I think the BSD/OS developers don’t work at WindRiver anymore. Some of them are now working on the free BSD’s.
WindRiver also owned at one point the trademark to FreeBSD, which they got when they acquired BSD/OS from another company. The FreeBSD Foundation is currently looking into the issue of getting that trademark back.
I would think there’s not a lot of love lost between FreeBSD and Wind River these days, considering that They abandonded FreeBSD 2 years ago, laying off several people in the process. Oh, and they did the same to Slackware before that, so I doubt any of their new ventures will involve Slackware either.
Maybe I’m wrong, but they strike me as simply another ‘also-ran’ company out there testing the winds to see which press releases to make. Now, they are jumping on the Linux bandwagon… big deal.
I wonder how profitable Wind River might have been if they had stuck with FreeBSD, and then tried to work out a decent relationship with Apple. Oh well…
Sorry, but *nix is NOT Windriver’s primary concern. Their primary product is VxWorks which is an RTOS. I realize that there are RTOS versions of Linux out there, however most customers I have encountered prefer either Windriver’s VxWorks, Greenhill’s Integrity, or LynxOS (or some other large commercial OS). Generally VxWorks is a primary request. The reason why? Past success in projects such as Mar’s Pathfinder continue to sell the OS and it’s tools. Windriver is the Micro$oft of the RTOS/embedded world!
the one time I used a device running VxWorks – it was a Clarent Optical switch and management software. The booting time was just horrible and most of the management functions were dog slow – and the device wasn’t under significant load.
I’d like to get more exposure to it – does anyone know a site where one can login to a VxWorks device or maybe a simulator?
Linux is viral and benifits businesses in the short term. We all know the GPL is a communist license. BSD is the best license there is, well actually, the MIT license is