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BSDi's Software Divisions Acquired by Wind River
big knife writes: "Check here for the official press release." Wind River is the company that puts out vxWorks, the embedded OS that runs our great Arrowpoint Web Content Switch we have here at OSDN. Evidently, BSDi will become iXsystems, dealing with BSD product solutions, and hardware (essentially a beefed up Telenet Systems). The status of FreeBSD and their commitment to Open Source, and FreeBSD in specific is mentioned, definitely a good thing.
Wind River's products aren't all good. They're also responsible for WinPOET, the horrid PPP-over-Ethernet client most residential DSL customers live with. It's got memory leaks--bad ones--and has had them for a few versions straight. Use it, and you'd be led to think PPPoE is a terrible technology with a lot of overhead. The installer is pretty big and involved, too.
What's even stranger is that this comes from an embedded-systems software company. You'd think they'd be well-positioned to pull off a PPPoE implementation at least as small and stable as some of the (downright tiny) Linux ones. Setting aside the kernel modules now available, there are things like rt-pppoe, a userspace client that manages to chug along merrily in a few dozen kilobytes of RAM.