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Interview with Jay Michaelson of Wasabi Systems

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the getting-to-know dept.

Gentu writes "The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. OSNews talked to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson. Linux in the embedded market is also discussed."

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wrong! I think FreeBSD has had SMP support even longer than Linux, alas it was for DEC Alpha only way back in the begining of the project.
    Most Linux user make fun of GIANT, but in reality it's not much of an issue, as the system shouldn't spend time in the kernel (as it does in Linux) but actually run userland stuff, so, GIANT isn't that much of an issue on 8 or less CPU's.

  2. Re:Scalability by cyb97 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are several embedded systems that use SMP, namely a lot of mobilephones do so... One for software and one for GSM-handling, that's the kludge phonemakers used to get around the timing problems with GSM. Dual CPU-phones don't put as high demands upon RealTime handling and stability on the softwareside of things as the GSM-CPU would still be available to handle GSM-requests...

  3. Why I like NetBSD by ExEleven · · Score: 1, Insightful

    1) Small
    2) Powerfull
    3) Unix

    Its "j00 1337"

  4. Re:Interview is (-1 Flaim bait) by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Ive always viewed this as:

    GPL: takes measures to protect anything that could be.

    BSD License: takes measures to protect what is currently available.

    The BSD License understands that the code that is released will never be lost if someone decides to close source it, and it is up to the company/whoever to decide if they want to make that purely voluntary contribution back to the community. THe GPL goes further and tries to protect code that doesnt exist yet, but doesnt give you the choice, as you said. The only choice the GPL gives you is wether or not you want to use the code in the first place, one which i always turn down and look elsewhere.