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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).
I was forcefull migrated off BSD/OS to FreeBSD a week ago. Perhaps things at Windriver aren't so great and the word is out?
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.
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.
When I worked at Applied Materials many years back, he ran the division I was working in. Although I never directly interacted with him, I found his management style well balanced and his speeches inspiring. Looking back, I would have no qualms about working under him again.
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
Someone needs to post about how Tom St. Dennis only has 40,000 red blood cells, down from 100,000 last year. Someone? Help?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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)
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.
The BSD Family Tree
-Linux will soon be owned by either IBM or SCO...
-Windows was never alive
-BSD is dying...
guess we have to go back to AmigaOS again
BSDI had several full-time FreeBSD developers on their payroll when WindRiver acquired them.
When you cut and paste an old Mac flame, try to remember to change details like the model (8600/300) if you really want to wind people up. :-D
--Jon
Yet another "BSD is dying" FUD at /.
Confusing WindRiver with the FreeBSD Project is a silly mistake.
--- Signature? You must be kidding!
Now electronic news is reporting that St. Dennis was ousted by the board.
NetBSD: the cathedral vs the bizzare.
Not entirely off-topic, I admit, but Wind River has offered a desktop-version of their GUI toolkit called "Zinc" for free use (with certain ristrictions). So I'm curious: has anybody here had any experience with Zinc? Is it any good?
t op /index.html
http://www.windriver.com/products/zinc_for_desk
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
Is that where that behemoth ended up? At windriver?
I used Zinc in the early 90's to do some very light-weight cross platform toys, but that was about it -- it was a jack of all trades, master of none when it came down to it -- like most of the class of tools under the umbrella of CASE
In fact today, using AWT in Java reminds me of that experience
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
We use vxworks here and from our perspective it has a number of problems.
Firstly they have been trying to push a subscription scheme from there old licensing model. For existing projects this works out as very expensive(10,000 per seat per year).
Support can be poor and updates unreliable. We recently had some poor drivers which took ages to debug and a poor network stack. Until recently source code was a very expensive optional extra, so leaving you very stuck waiting for vxworks to get there act together. And remember we are paying for all this in our support contract.
Also on the horizon is embedded linux. The pricing structure is such that if go with vxWorks for low end products any profit margin is taking by license costs, therefore RT linux has been killing them in this area.
On the plus side, if you have a non standard board or processor getting a working OS on it is a breeze with vxWorks.
But I think embedded linux is starting to make there high costs look increasingly out of phase with the real world. I can see a lot of changes occurring in the next 6 months.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
i'm so happy to see that someone's archived this!
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.