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Wind River Announces It Likes Linux After All
onecrazyfoo writes "Wind River is going to start supporting Linux in the embedded market. Pretty big news from the largest company in the embedded tools market. What makes it even more interesting is the fact that they have been very anti-Linux and outspoken about it in the past. You can read more about their announcement at LinuxDevices.com." I'm guessing this has come about because of recent changes in the company.
Hopefully this will mean better developer tools for embedded Linux in the future.
This is not enough.
that BSD is dying.
but WindRiver really is very interested in using linux side by side with vxworks and their other products. I've seen some of the demo products, I've heard some of the talks. I know that any company that once shunned linux is forever lying and full of shit from the slashflamerdot's point of view, but companies change with the times. That's the sign of a good company.
...who SCO is going to sue next.
This is an actual question, wasn't Wind River one of the major contributors to the fantastic development work done on FreeBSD?
Short version, no.
Longer version: When BSDi fell on hard times around 4/2001, it was sold to Wind River. Many FreeBSD developers made the move. Shortly thereafter many major FreeBSD developers bailed to Apple. The vibe from the higher-ups was that BSD/OS was the "real" product at Wind River.
Wind River are leeches. Don't expect them to contribute much, if anything.
Last time I checked, the Wind River toolchain I was using (Tornado) was built on top of gcc and gdb. So they added a GUI wrapper to it -- so what? It's still THE SAME tool chain you get for free with any embedded Linux!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Indeed, the VisionProbe II sounds very similar to some Abatron hardware (a BDI2000, IIRC) I was using to do kernel debugging via GDB a few years ago when working at MontaVista.
And speaking of -- there are plenty of companies which have been in the embedded Linux market longer than Wind River, and have much more Linux-friendly engineering staffs. MontaVista is one of these, Lineo another... wouldn't it make sense for your embedded Linux business to go to a company that's been focused around Linux from the start rather than just for the last few months?
The only thing that really hasn't been mature on Linux until fairly recently is the desktop. All your compilation tools (and OS sandbox/emulator enviroments) have been quite solid and stable for some time now.
Another company falling for the greed of money; guess they all want to make money. Just like RedHat = Microsoft in Linux land but Linux users tend to hate M$ or anything non-Linux for that matter... Oxymoron? Most of them just say they hate windows cause they think it's cool to say that; yet they usually use windows just the same.
Well, I personally use *BSD, Solaris and Windows - I don't hate any of these because I believe in using the right tool for the job.
Linux is about making money with hype.
*BSD is about freedom!
*BSD - may the source be with you.
Perhaps they both also have a lot to lose by ignoring Linux. Linux seems to be a disruptive technology, perhaps thier best bet is to build a new core business around Linux, rather than to hang onto their old core business till it is totally eaten.
Neither Sun nor Wind River were keen to embrace Linux in the past. Perhaps their change of heart is a sign that they see no other choice. It would not be surprising that they regret a decision they feel they were forced into.
Peter
Uhh, he wasn't saying Linux is shit, he was saying VxWorks (the proprietary RTOS made my Wind River) is shit. And he's right.
"And I would argue that anyone who does not see the *potential* of Linux, both in terms of technology development and the bottom line, is an idiot. "
Sure, and don't you see the *potential* in FreeBSD? In fact, it's been technically superior in a number of ways for a while. Only with Linux 2.6 is Linux really getting an edge over FreeBSD.
"What I mean here are the folks who, despite the staggering amount of evidence and press to the contrary, still think of Linux and OSS software as some sort of quaint ameature effort."
Hmm, that is one hell of a generalization. There are MANY OSS project which are quant amature efforts. There are also many which are not. But it's true that as a whole, no Linux based system has anywhere close to the integration and polish of commercial systems. To this very day, I still haven't managed to get my office "Linux" computer to fully work. *Something* is always broken.
"The head of my division is one of these guys -- we've taken to calling him "executivus obsoletus". "
Wow, aren't we conceded! Did you ever stop to think that just *maybe* that exective is much older, and more experienced than you? Did you consider that maybe he doesn't like Linux because he knows better?
I used to like Linux too, and never understood those experienced admins and executives. Then I completed my CS degree in addition to reading some real CS articles on operating systems. I quickly came to the realization that Linux is not all that, and it never has been. That's when I because disgusted with the Linux community for putting on such a farce of a show.
Yes, leeches all.
It isn't like they wrote the manual for GDB or contributed significantly towards C++ support in GCC. Oh wait, they did.
-josh
Now, I'm not ordinarily one to run around calling "troll" on people, but seriously, you called PHP Cryptic. C'mon now.
It's the easiest language ever.
-9mm-
What you just asked for is a system where you can get a tested release.
Red Hat provides that. It's their distribution. If you yank out parts and something doesn't work...it's not a huge surprise. The equivalent to BSD 4.x is Debian stable or RH 7.x (which is what most people see to use for production servers running RH, due to strong maturity). Just because Linus has tagged something as "2.6-pre-foo" doesn't mean that you have a tested, complete system. That means that *he* is getting close to the point where he's ready to hand the kernel off to *Red Hat and other distro vendors* to begin testing and integration. It doesn't mean that the kernel is end-user ready if you want a tested environment.
After the kernel hits 2.6 and it's been poked at a bit and decided that there's at least a decent chance that you can use it without problems, Red Hat will put it into Rawhide. That should be considered post-development -- about alpha quality. As a matter of fact, Rawhide doesn't even have formal "releases" -- it's a working repository for integration folks -- so it might be considered pre-alpha using conventional definitions. That's when testing on a wide variety of systems begins. When RH feels confident that there aren't known problems after trying on a number of systems, they move to beta, of which Severn is their current release. This is already much further down the pipeline than you're talking about, and it's just *beta*. You may not have a tested upgrade path, but you can probably use the software. Don't cry if it doesn't work -- it hasn't passed rigorous QA, but you can probably use it on a testing system without egregious problems. *Finally*, RH does a release. RH's releases tend to be considered a bit bleeding-edge, relative to extremely conservative distributions like Debian stable (wasn't that long ago that Debian stable finally left the 2.2 kernel). After the thing's been out a bit and bugfixes have been released (kind of like businesses wait a bit after a new Windows release to let people hammer on the thing and find any dings that missed earlier examination), *then* you can consider the thing stable in a conservative sense. *Only* from release to release is there a tested upgrade path on software.
Your problem was that you were jumping the gun WRT testing by a long way. When you upgrade from FBSD 5.x, you've at least had the piece of software "integrated" into the rest of the software. It's equivalent to Rawhide, if not beta. You were yanking something that Linus hasn't even felt comfortable handing off to QA people yet and saying "gee, it doesn't work".
Other distros have their own approachs -- I just happen to know RH's better -- but the point remains that there's a hella lot more testing in the pipeline before that software should be considered something that you'd want to put on your system. How do you know you aren't going to run into filesystem corruption, or God knows what? The development releases are releases intended specifically for the use of kernel developers, and if anyone else can get good out of 'em...great. 2.6-pre *is* part of 2.5, ignoring the unusual naming. It's just denoting the fact that there's an intention to move to 2.6 soon. 2.6.0, the first release QA/integration folks should be looking at, is still months away.
Now, a lot of Linux folks like seriously riding the metal, and some folks use development kernels, even doing ballsy things like putting them on their personal workstations. However, they also don't say "Linux sucks" if something doesn't work or they wipe out their filesystem. A fair number of 'em don't realize that what they're doing is a bit risky -- it's not just using mozilla daily snapshots. There ends up with this misperception on Slashdot that folks should be able to comfortably run development releases of kernels. Folks, it's called "development" for a reason -- it isn't even alpha yet!
May we never see th