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..."
... move the slash left one character.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Q: What do you call a gathering of BSD enthusiasts?
A: A funeral.
Yeah maybe Wind River will flow into Walnut Creek. Yort!
Before we all go off on the *bsd is dying trip, let's look at the actual statistics, from Netcraft. This survey is current. Thanks.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
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 is not dead, it's just homeless for the time being.
Please expect this fine OS to be smelling a bit ripe at your nearest highway exit ramp with a sign that says "Will boot for partition space".
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
you can find the full announcement here. Alan Clegg -- Formerly abc@bsdi.com
Whatever.
Primarily an embedded OS and tools company. They sell VxWorks (OS), the Vision* (...Probe, ...ICE, ...Click) products, SNiFF+ (A code management/editor/analysis package that rocks and runs on Linux), and Diab (embedded compiler).
We use several of their products at my company to develop MCF5407 systems. Not that I'd buy WR products again though...
Actually, they're really a "aquire and kill" company...over the last several years they've gone on a major aqusions binge, and many of the products of companies they've aquired (mostly competitors, and often with superior products) they've either let stagnate or killed outright.
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
I guess it's time to say a few words as a past member of the BSD/OS development team.
Wind River had trouble dealing with the BSD thing for a long time. Keep in mind that their aim was *embedded* stuff, not the UNIX we all know and love.
In that regard, their announcement is just a move back to a market Wind has been more successful in.
I, too, knew the end was coming when I was one of the five people that received a pink slip in January, and I was (and I still am) worried about what happens to the people left behind. I hope they do well; some have troube dealing with the loss of something they've worked on for a decade or more.
Of the five that have left, many have found a new place, but some are still looking. If you're looking for some *real* good folk, ping them. (I work at a leading Dutch security company now).
I've had a *wonderful* 6 years at BSDI/Wind, and would like to thank the people I've worked with (including customers) for making it happen.
BSD development will continue, it will just happen elsewhere. May the source be with you.
Geert Jan