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Wind River CEO Unexpectedly Resigns

Posted by Hemos on from the going-on-with-bidness dept.

The Finn writes "According to Electronics Weekly Wind River CEO Tom St. Dennis resigned today and left Wind River. For those who forgot, Wind River assumed stewardship of FreeBSD as part of the BSDi acquisition in May 2001, and subsequently Cut it loose in January 2002, and it still sells BSD /OS 5.0. I'll avoid the speculation of BSD dying, but Wind River may not be looking so good."

11 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:License contradiction by rapiere · · Score: 3, Informative

    You should of course read "However Wind River and Wasabi Systems gives a generous access to their proprietary source to some bsd developpers".

    If some admin could modify my post, I grant him my benediction.

  2. WindRiver are not related to the FreeBSD project. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    WindRiver never, ever had any involvment with the FreeBSD project. What they bought was the FreeBSD merchanidise business that originally had been started by Walnut Creek and was subsequently owned by BSDi. WindRiver subsquently sold the FreeBSD merchanidise part of the aquisition to FreeBSD Mall who are still selling FreeBSD merchandise. What happens to WindRiver is of no relevance to FreeBSD in the slightest, and they had nothing to do with the project itself at any time, they just bought out one of the many FreeBSD merchandise comapanies that exist.

  3. Wind River dying? GOOD! by wowbagger · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sorry, but I have the misfortune of using Wind Rivers' VxWorks real time OS. I've have very little luck getting support from them (usually I have figured out the problem myself long before they can respond). Their hardware support is poor, their disk I/O layer is abysmal, their compilers out of date, and they are way too expensive for what you get. They don't have USB drivers (unless you want to be a printer, not a controller), they don't have SMB drivers, they killed their embedded X server (guess what I needed!), their board support packages don't (imaging a BSP for a Strongarm that does not even enable the cache!)

    If I had it all to do over again, I would have used an embedded Linux rather than VxWorks. Granted, I work on some pretty large and complex systems that are just too much for VxWorks.

    If you are doing a smaller system, use something like eCOS or RTXC. If you are doing a larger system or a system that must be networked, use QNX , BSD or Linux.

    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
    1. Re:Wind River dying? GOOD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why would you be doing some of the things you say you want to do with a real-time OS? An RTOS is not the same thing as an OS. The whole point is the real-time capabilities. If you can use Linux to solve your problems, you don't need an RTOS. Are you just trying to find an OS to run your big complex system or what?

      That said, you left out some OS suggestions: if you need a truly tiny-footprint RTOS, you can't get much smaller than Express Logic's ThreadX. And if you need a guaranteed-rock-solid high-reliability RTOS, look at Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY. Neither of those, however, have SMB support, embedded X servers, etc. But customers at Ford, Lockheed, etc. don't usually care about running an embedded X server on the chip running their vehicles...

    2. Re:Wind River dying? GOOD! by DES · · Score: 3, Informative
      To be accurate, WRS Never "supported" BSD - their OS is completely different. They bought Walnut Creek, a distributor of, among other things, BSD.

      Actually, they bought BSDI, maker of BSD/OS, then sold off all the bits BSDI had acquired from Walnut Creek. And they did have a number of FreeBSD developers on their payroll for a while.

    3. Re:Wind River dying? GOOD! by The+Vulture · · Score: 2, Informative

      This isn't surprising (the part about FreeBSD developers on the payroll).

      While the core OS itself was written from scratch, a lot of the periphery code (i.e. network stack, device drivers, etc.) come from one of the BSD's (I can't tell which one though, since I haven't bothered to read all of the code). And, judging by some of the dates in the changelog, they haven't been updated in a *long* time.

      -- Joe

  4. Re:WindRiver are not related to the FreeBSD projec by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    They still sell BSD/OS, a commercial version of FreeBSD, which they got from BSDi.

    It is probrably 1% of their business, so - as you said - troubles at Wind River, if any, do not reflect on FreeBSD.

  5. Re:WindRiver are not related to the FreeBSD projec by mph · · Score: 4, Informative
    BSD/OS, a commercial version of FreeBSD
    BSD/OS is not a version of FreeBSD. Both of them are BSD-derived operating systems. They have a common ancestor, but neither was derived from the other.

    The BSD Family Tree

  6. Re:WindRiver are not related to the FreeBSD projec by DES · · Score: 5, Informative
    WindRiver never, ever had any involvment with the FreeBSD project.

    BSDI had several full-time FreeBSD developers on their payroll when WindRiver acquired them.

  7. WindRiver != {Free,Net,Open}BSD by MythicalMan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yet another "BSD is dying" FUD at /.

    Confusing WindRiver with the FreeBSD Project is a silly mistake.

    --
    --- Signature? You must be kidding!
  8. St. Dennis ousted by board by The+Finn · · Score: 3, Informative

    Now electronic news is reporting that St. Dennis was ousted by the board.

    --
    NetBSD: the cathedral vs the bizzare.