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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."

19 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. License contradiction by rapiere · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

    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. Slashdot double standards! by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Slashdot double standards! by eht · · Score: 4, Insightful

      /. is owned by VA Linux.

      Make you own conspiracy theorist backed conclusions.

  3. 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.

  4. He was pretty good... by baywulf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. 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 The+Vulture · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Good to know that I'm not the only person who had problems with WindRiver support from time to time.

      One thing to keep in mind though (and many of my colleagues share this view) is that the actual RTOS is very good, but the other things aren't. Unfortunately (for the company I worked for), WindRiver bundled things in such a way that it was seen to be more convenient to use their built-in IP stack (for example) than buying a third-party one. Some developers spent months trying to debug WindRiver's routing stack, versus buying a working solution, since it "just made sense to be a complete WindRiver shop". Let's just say that management's decisions have almost driven the company out of business (parts of it are being acquired, what's left is expected to be around for no more than two months).

      Yes, their BSP support is somewhat lacking, but, at least for us, they were one of the few companies that could get us a BSP that supported the Broadcom 3350 CPU (MIPS3K based).

      When I talked to a QNX tech at the Embedded Systems Conference, he explained their support for the Broadcom 1250 (the core we were using at the time), it made WindRiver's RTOS seem absolutely laughable.

      -- Joe

    3. 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.

    4. Re:Wind River dying? GOOD! by gooser23 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was introduced to VxWorks when my previous employer asked me to port some drivers (ISA, PC-104 and PCI) for it. My overall impression was that it provided some nice libraries (multi-processes, semaphores, sockets, pipes, networking, as well as low-level IO) and was a piece of cake to get set up. It was Tornado, the IDE for VxWorks, that sucked. At best I was able to ignore it... at worst I actually had to use it.

      I really don't know what the dev team was thinking when the released it. Its a total visual studio 6 rip off, but most of the useful features don't work, and the others are buggy or illogical at best. The debugger could never remember what radix to display data in, anytime a file was saved with the editor you lost your undo buffer, and every now and then it woud do strange things to the build rules (the makefiles were generated every time you built a module) that would generally screw everything up and leave you with an error message like 'not found' or 'error'.

      So, I gave up using it and did my work in MSVC: it was far quicker to write custom build rules for VC than to fight with Tornado. When I left that job I spent an entire day writing a report on the bugs and strange things that Tornado would do.

      The one thing that Tornado did do right was its remote connection. I was able to boot VxWorks off of a floppy on a test machine, and control it via Tornado's debugging terminal on my dev computer. It took some getting used to (the frame pointer wasn't always in thre right spot, and nested function calls could confuse things), but it worked well enough to finish the project on time.

      --
      "Dying tickles!" -- Ralph Wiggum
    5. 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

  6. VxWorks by jd · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Their RTOS - VxWorks - is, or rather was, very powerful. I've used VxWorks for fairly significant projects twice - once in '91 and once last year.


    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:

    • If you aren't moving forwards, you're moving backwards.
    • If you are moving forwards, it'll take increasingly more effort to do so.
    • Moore's Law applies to silicon. Murphy's Law applies to software.

    --
    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)
  7. 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

  8. does not look good... by BigBadDude · · Score: 2, Funny

    -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

  9. 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.

  10. Re:Wind River and BSD problems by jonbelson · · Score: 2, Funny

    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

  11. 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!
  12. 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.