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Wind River CEO Unexpectedly Resigns
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."
Quite sad to see Wind River in trouble ("The companyâ(TM)s revenue declined 20 percent last quarter" - Electronic News) as it decreases FreeBSD deployement among enterprises.
I don't know much about other firms using BSD (like Wasabi Systems) however it seems it's more difficult for them to sell BSD systems compared with Linux distributors.
Quite contradictoraly, BSD license is more "liberal" than Linux from the enterprise point of view which can use the code with minimal restrictions (FreeBSD License) Wind River and Wasabi Systems gives a generous access to their proprietary source to some bsd developpers)
As Linux gains momentum, I hope IT managers will see those nice BSD lurking around, using them, and helping maintaining them (like hiring developpers to work on these systems).
So it's "news for nerds, stuff that matters" when the Wind River CEO resigns unexpectedly (I use FreeBSD and I don't have any idea who they are), but it's not "news for nerds, stuff that matters" when VA Linux CEO Larry Augustin resigned unexpectedly?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The OS in 1991 was pretty decent. Things were up-to-date, and it was the best thing VME had going for it. (VME is a great standard. Pity about the companies implementing it.)
Last year, though... That was another matter. VxWorks was unreliable and unstable. (I don't care what my boss at the time claimed - I was needing to reboot the VME crate repeatedly, and that's not acceptable. That's worse than my coding!)
IMHO, VxWorks has had a good run. It's been around a long time, it has had some wonderful moments, but somewhere along the line it took a wrong turn. It's time Wind River accepted this.
Wind River also does need to cash in a reality check or two, when it comes to pricing and support. We are NOT living in the boom times, we are NOT living in the early 1990's, when competition simply didn't exist and companies could charge what they liked and get away with it.
Even Microsoft is beginning to feel the pinch, and that's impressive, given that it has enough spare cash to function at 100% capacity for the next three to four years without selling a single thing. That's just the loose change!
*BSD isn't dying, it isn't even remotely close to it. Although the kernel does need some serious work, as technology is moving ahead faster than the coders.
That's true for Linux, too. Progress in the field is outpacing the kernel coders by miles. That's not good, because it means certain hostile companies can out-flank these efforts, by simply skipping a generation or two of technology and going to the latest. We've seen that more than once.
What's dying is the rate of development, as a function of the rate of technological change. That's not unusual when projects get very large. The larger a project, the more effort it takes to add even small components. Too much interaction to check for and debug.
Wind River will likely vanish. By pricing itself out of the market, creating hostile public opinion, and by not building up the programming staff required to keep the momentum going, it will kill itself.
FreeBSD'll move elsewhere, bruised but otherwise unharmed. It'll be set back a little, though, as it'll take time for the politics to work out.
The underlying issues, though, are universal to all software writers:
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're a hoot! Really though, speaking as a FreeBSD/*BSD zealot, GPL-hater, and a Linux-doubter, the AmigaDOS of old is dead, dead, dead--but that doesn't mean some old fans of the OS couldn't bring it back to life in a new, slightly different form in the same way Mr. Torvalds did with U**x. BSD/XFree86/Darwin teams all offer a lot of code that ought to be reused in other places as well as in *BSD/OSX/X11. I'm finding myself becoming more and more hostile to the notion of the "One true OS" or the "One true Desktop" or the "One true Windowing System" or the "One true web browser" or "One true scripting language". The only good alternative to all of that is the ability to share good code with as few hoops to jump through as possible so that fewer people have to reinvent the wheel in the open source world and good software gets cheaper.