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Wind River Moving Towards Linux
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices reports that Wind River, the world's #1 embedded software company, moved two steps closer to Linux today, with a pair of announcements that it has joined two key organizations. Wind River has joined the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and says it plans to contribute to the OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) working group. Wind River also announced that it has joined the Eclipse Consortium, an industry group devoted to an open cross-vendor platform for development tools integration, and that it is committed to the Eclipse platform 'to enable global enterprises to standardize embedded development on a single, open standards-based integrated development environment (IDE).' This follows an October Linux tools announcement which it called 'just the first step.'" We had also covered the initial announcement.
In fact, the project was one that had been 'orphaned' by Wind River, because they had bought out ISI, and 'deep-sixed' PSOS (thanks, guys). Faced with having to re-write all the OS interfaces in the code to upgrade to faster processors, we figured it would be just about as much trouble to move to a Linux-based system, and that would 'future-proof' us against further corporate shenanigans.
I had used VxWorks in the past on other projects, and had achieved a nice working relationship with the local Wind River sales and engineering support folks. Wind River's behavior over the last few years, though, has pretty much destroyed that.
Wind River may be trying to jump on the band wagon now, but it may already be too late. Folks like me have long memories.
Considering that GCC and the GNU toolchain has been used for much of their crossplatform development kit for a while now.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is not their first brush with open source. After acquiring BSDi, they encouraged BSD/OS users to move to FreeBSD, than dropped support entirely (or rather. they transferred FreeBSD sponsorship to FreeBSD MALL). Anyway, the point is, that back then, when this announcement was made, I saw the usual argument of BSD licence being more "liberal" than GPL. It seems that this might not be the case after all.
I don't want to bash BSD - in fact I use it both as a desktop and on a server, and I love it. I like it better than linux, while I like the licence of Linux better than BSD. The moment a company adopts a software under the BSD licence, it has too choices. It can keep it open source (in which case it would use it almost as if it were GPL) or make it closed source (relinquishing the advantages of the Open Source development model). I believe the two balance each other out, but the BSD licence makes code exchange between linux development and BSD development (both excellent and cutting edge softwares) a one way road, which is not a good thing in the long run imho.
Anyhow, this news confirms that the favorite claims of BSD users, that is to say, the BSD licence is more corporate friendly, is not necessarily true. Wind River was known to be a BSD company (they still sell BSDi 5.0) but they are on the way of becoming a linux company (well, not a linux company per se, but a company that supports - and favors - linux instead of BSD, despite the licence.) It seems that the embedded BSD project (link) is not quite flourishing.
As the article states, before anyone gets too excited, they want to use CGL alongside VxWorks, not instead of their proprietary embedded OS. They're not ditching their OS, they're just picking a distro to use for interface, it looks like. Maybe but some hooks in for communications with embedded devices.
My experiences with Wind River have all centered around VxWorks. In their own words, a 'POSIX-like' OS. Effectively, they support POSIX calls, but with some minor variations of functionality or parameters that totally mess you up. For example, a PIPE. How can you screw up a pipe? They managed to do it... and rather well, too.
The VxWorks system has never had good memory protection. I think every CPU ever made for ten years now has had an MMU on board... Geez. And yet, every task running has full Read/Write access to every other task's memory, including the OS's memory.
I could go on, but if any contributions are of this sort of quality, then no thanks.
At first I was thinking "Hmmm, why in the hell would they choose Eclipse?". I mean Eclispe is OK but its written in, get this, Java. Blech. It feels much like NetBeans. That is, slow, bloated, and generally funky dispite some nice features. Then after reading most of the comments so far I understand why.
Wind River seems to be known for playing stupid games. I've heard they drop support for products as quickly as they create them. There are some strange claims (check SCO references to Wind River). They're coporate road map must be all over the place. In my opinion that makes them unstable and untrustworthy. I wouldn't trust them to choose a proper IDE (hence Eclipse).
Java, yeah right. Can you tell I've been burned? And I've been using Java since the pre-1.0 days.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
both. Embedded Linux is an attractive host OS, and if that's the target platform, why not develop on a Linux box too?
You certainly don't have any clue about what you are talking about? "Staying with Windows"? What do you mean staying with windows? Wind River is/was a traditional Unix and BSD player. They bought BSDI a couple of years ago for god's sake. Now it seems they are moving to Linux. What do you mean by staying with Windows? No company in it's right mind, is using Windows in the embeded systems (in the kind of systems that Wind River produces). Also of note (though off topic), according to statistics, no one is delaying their Linux plans because of SCO.
--
Yep. Asked about the 'silent majority' that, according the the paranoid delusions of Mc-soon-to-be-Prison-Bride WindRiver is with SCO with concern to the GPL:
SCO Teleconference, transcript here.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Search Google.
c hive/5/ 2001/04/4/1991
l e.php/7 34561
See Also here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ar
and here:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/artic
And so you see, from just these 2 articles, that WR really just wanted BSD, because well, the BSD license lets them continue the properietary licensed and royalty generatig scheme they are used to.
Fortunately for us, they did not see that Slackware is genuinely useful for creating embedded systems. Mine (see earlier) runs on a x386 with 12Mb flash and 8Mb ram. We have 2 proprietary apps running on a 2.4.18 kernel along with a large gnu support set inc, ash, snmp, telent, ftp, httpd, and lots of custom scripts.
HAHA, and NO royalties to Wind River!!!
JoeR