Slashdot Mirror
Wind River To Stop Selling BSD/OS
David writes "According to an article on Bsdnewsletter.com, OS company Wind River has said it will be stopping sales of BSD/OS on this December 31st, and product support exactly one year thereafter. Only 15 more weeks to grab the final 5.1 update before this piece of history might be gone forever..."
Slightly less than 10 years ago, I was invited to visit BSDI HQ - a very nice house in Colorado Springs. This was before they moved to the "real" office space a few miles away.
The whole house was wired up for geekiness. They had terminals in various places and plenty of computers. The AV room had massive speakers, a projection screen, and tons of components. Outside, there was a RCA DSS dish, which had been on the market for less than a year as I recall.
In one of the hallways there were a few gold CDs of various releases in picture frames. At the time, they were still working on the 2.0 release (first one called BSD/OS as opposed to BSD/386, if I remember correctly), so there were only a couple up there.
They certainly seemed to have their business affairs in order. Now here it is and their company has been eaten by another, and now the former flagship product is being killed.
I shut down my last BSD/OS system almost 4 years ago and moved to Slackware, so it won't affect me. I just wonder what happened to them when things were obviously quite good at one time.
BSD/OS had some kick ass SMP support. They were also great live support. Terrible package support, but that was the worst of it.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
It seems like only a year ago when Wind River took over BSD/OS and made lots of lavish praises and promises but, I think everyone knew that this would be the final result. Frankly I never fully understood why Wind River picked it up in the first place.
In any case, I do not feel that this is a significant loss. The major BSD development is happening in FreeBSD and NetBSD, BSD/OS was never a strong contender.
None the less, this does clearly demonstrate what happens to software that is owned by closed source companies.
Kevin,
I wish you would stop posting this crap and just move on with your life. I'm sorry that things worked out the way they did, but you gave us no choice. As it was, I spent a lot of time convincing Jon and Bill not to have you brought up on criminal charges. I even managed to get you a week's severence.
Instead of being grateful that they gave you a break, you have become obsessed with trying to sabotage their business -- but your *BSD is dying posts are just childish and silly. We move more product now than when you left. No one is cancelling orders because of your anonymous messages on Slashdot.
I think that you could still have a bright future, but if this keeps up, Jon and Bill are going to get pissed off and have you brought up on criminal charges. Is that what you want? How many jobs will you get when potential employers see a criminal record that includes the theft of company computer equipment? Jon still has the laptop that he bought back from the pawn shop along with the company's original purchase records for it. He still has printouts of the ads you put up on ebay for the DLT auto-loader and the RAID array. There are records showing that your badge was used to gain entrance to the building at 2:13AM on the day that the equipment was stolen. On top of the thefts, we also have logs showing your attempts to break into the servers using your ID the evening after you were let go.
Do you want to end up being some guy's bitch in prison? That's what may happen if you keep this up. If you think that your shopping mall karate classes are going to do you any good there, you are in for a shock.
Tim
P.S. Please don't bother with denying this, who you are, and so forth. This started practically the day after you were let go. The writing style and the Kreskin reference leaves no doubt as to who's posting this. (Like someone else is going to go to that much trouble to discredit BSD and then not sign their name! Get real.)
I've never seen proof that Linux isn't a geeks' OS, considering the difficulty in getting mainstream people to accept that yes, something useful can still be done at the command line...
From a users' perspective, there should be almost no functional difference between using a BSD machine, a Linux machine, and a commercial UNIX (Sun, HP-UX, etc) machine. All of the differences that I have seen have been in adminstration. So, even if BSD is dying, Admins will be the only ones to really notice.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
BSDi... my first hacked server.
No, I didn't hack it... It was the first server I admin'd that got hacked (circa 1997).
I was a network guy in those days and somehow inherited the admin of that machine (running Livingston Radius!) and managed via unrestricted telnet.
All of my unix experience came from having installed Redhat *once* as a lark, but since in the land of the blind the man with one eye is king, I was it.
I remember seeing all those funny named process in the top display, doing a search on Altavista and then begining to panic.
Eventually we switched over to FreeBSD and Solaris and my interest in unix (and hopefully, my knowledge) grew from there.
No sig
Is Wind River really an "OS company" or are they a "CD pressing and distribution company?"
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Was BSD/OS popular before the free BSDs? I see on their site that they have some information about embedding BSD/OS -- is there a piece of hardware we might all know about, or is it more for internal hardware projects?
What about F5 BigIP? It used to run on NetBSD but they needed a commerical OS so they moved on. F5's 3DNS version 3.x ran on FreeBSD, but they migrated it to BSDi in version 4.0.
I wonder if they will try to maintain BSD/OS themselves or migrate back?
So anyone know what will happen to the source? Any chance of it being released into the Open Source community? I'm sure some of it would benefit other *NIXes out there.
Disclaimer: The above comment was made while under the influence of too much coding and not enough sleep.
That's fairly subtle, considering the events of the last day or so. Bravo, and, I think, a point well made.
There are differences, of course, between publicly consumed intellectual property, like music, and sector-targeted intellectual property, like software: Differences in support requirements, public perception of traditional ownership and rights, the respective industries' take on enforcement and public relations, and the kinds and scope of typical license infringement.
But ... It's still a good point, so I'm a little disappointed that you're not modded up ...
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
Here at work we still have 20+ BSDi machines. We started back in the 1.x days (still have the manuals somewhere.....) and have kept with it ever since. Over the years, we've had to do some custom hacks to fix some OSS software (Cyrus IMAP, just to mention one) but for the most part it is still a rock solid OS with the only downtime being when BSDi released a kernel mod that needed a reboot.
Of couse now we are moving to FreeBSD and Linux, but it's sad to see an old friend reach the end of it's life. There were a lot of great things in BSDi (like the IPFW firewall syntax - it rocks) but I guess all good things must come to an end.
Fiarwell, my old friend.
Driven by 100% sarcasm - fueled by the need to be heard.
Remember the Gauntlet firewall? One of the first firewalls commercial firewalls, and one that you got the source for (it was not open source in the sense that you couldn't distribute source).
Anyway, make a long story short. Gauntlet ran Solaris, HP-UX, and BSDI, because it actually modified the kernal and several peripheral systems to make it more secure.
Well, it was geared to a specific release of BSDI. I suspect this was one of the big sellers, and when Gauntlet essentially died of old age (and a company that had no interest in keeping its customers), BSDI lost a big chunk of the market.
Then you add the rise of the really "Free" BSD's and Linux, and that pretty much ended it.
But I'll say that BSDI was one of the most robust, forgiving, stable platforms I ran; a fortune 1000 company ran its entire email gateway systems on a pair of BSDI 4.x boxes running a customized FWTK proxy. They only reason it was retired was because the new guys were only Windows literate and BSDI scared them.
Anyway, I can't say enough good things about BSDI.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Actually, they did purchase a lot of companies a few years back. Diab and SingleStep allowed them to own the entire tool chain from compiler to debugger. They've been integrating these into their IDE in an attempt to provide an entire solution. They may have gotten pSOS or BSD to kill them, but don't forget there's also money in support.
Personally, I started using VxWorks almost 10 years ago and always considered it a decent OS. Sure, it's just one big memory space, but in a lot of ways it's a good solid scalable embedded operating system. Are you gonna put it on your PC, hell no. But it's hella good in telecom applications, and anything else that isn't going to need a pretty GUI. Oh yeah, and it supports IPv6 already.
I wouldn't count WindRiver out. With the some of the acquisitions they've made, the embedded Linux people will need some of their hardware and software just for debugging. They may end up being niche players, but they'll still have a share of the pie.
I just came back from a two month business trip in Japan. From what I saw in their bookstore was that there were several BSD magazines with 5.1 that comes with the magazines. I didn't see too many linux magazines though. Maybe the Japanese prefer BSD. Any Japanese slashdot readers out there?
Funny you say that, i choose freebsd over linux because it was easier.
Right, because of all the embedded development sales opportunities that were going towards BSDI??
Let's review. Was BSDI a highly successful embedded operating system? Was BSDI known for being used in realtime and/or small-scaled operating environments across tens of architectures?
Answers: No, no, and no.
Aside: pSOS was bought for tools and customer acquisition. It was a buyout ISI was actively interested because their company was taking on water rapidly. I mean, sure, WRS wouldn't mind eliminating competitors, but that's not how it happened.
Back to BSDI. It's a server OS. Sure, as technology marches onward, what was designed for minicomputers (BSD for VAX) becomes more appropriate for embedded. But where was the developer support for using BSDI in an embedded fashion? The company wasn't laying the groundwork for it. They were focusing on the networking appliance market. The code wasn't generally available either. People who wanted to do BSD with embedded were, as far as I know, using NetBSD. Wasabi, for example, was a customization and consulting group for doing embedded and custom network work with the NetBSD base.
So if BSDI wasn't a competitor, why were they bought? Three reasons: First, VxWorks used the BSD network stack, but their codebase wasn't meeting customer needs (TCP use changes in 10 years.. shock), while the BSDI base had been significantly enhanced. Second, BSDI/FreeBSD had some good talent who know their way around such things. Third, Linux was the rising threat in embedded (the storm surge sagged a bit with the dotcom collapse, though it's still around), and developing BSD expertise was seen as a counter to this. BSD isn't GPL, so some more real concerns in the embedded space go away, and well, there weren't any great embedded Linux companies to buy at the time. Besides, I think the nerds over there were kind of BSD-biased, being old crusty types.
-josh
And when it reached roughly v3.0, FreeBSD had caught up for the uses I needed (DNS/Apache/mail). So I migrated to FreeBSD and didn't look back. About 2 years later, I did the same thing, except this time I switched from FreeBSD to Linux. And I haven't looked back.
The BSDs are/were nice to use and are robust. For people that like *BSD, there's certainly no danger of them dying so there's no need to switch. Personally, I enjoy the greater support structure and commercial support behind Linux. I wonder if some other entity is going to step up and offer commercial support for BSD/OS?
Cheers,