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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.
Guess they are trying to get full value out of thir $699 payment.
Unless I miss recall Darl was citing Wind River as one of the companies involved in the protection of unix IP. I have to wonder if Wind River will have to pierce the corporate veil to slap him with a defamation suit.
Plan A - Embrace Linux
Plan B - Close eyes and ears as long as possible, then move to Plan A
Looks like they went for Plan B.
this is exactly the sort of thing that the SCO debacle is messing up. Wind river nust clearly think twice what would happen if they made the leap to linux and next year there was a judegement which gave SCO the advantage. Perhaps it would be better to stay with windows a year longer and see what happens, the reasoning might go.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Many of their major customers (including ultraconservative telecoms) have already been doing development in Linux for sometime. Like any good businessman, they are going where the customers are. But is that where the money is? They are trying to sell a product in a market where services are the cash cow.
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
Slackware had some very insecure months after Wind River took over Walnut Creek and cut Slackware loose.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
been using it for a year now for our Java development on an AT&T contract. Pretty sweet IDE compared to my years of using visual studio. They like not having to buy visual studio for me now as well.
In this article by Mike Downing of Integrated Communications Design, Wind River's Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Curt Schacker, expresses his company's concerns about the viability of using GPL-based software (like Linux) in embedded applications. "More customers are telling us that they see interesting aspects to Linux . . . but we're seeing a growing problem due to the growing uncertainty of using GPL-based code in embedded development," says Wind Rivers's Schaker according to Downing.
What are the options for revising the GPL, if any?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Actually, I would have thought it's considerably less of an drawback to embedded system manufacturers, since you can't often use the software outside the specific embedded hardware environment it's intended for, and therefore the hardware itself practically acts as a 'dongle' for the software.
The only change for them in going GPL might be to switch from a per-unit sales model to an outright-buy one to prevent their customers from getting their
GPL source re-compiled elsewhere after the first box is delivered.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
I never knew what "ashen faced" was until I asked if I could add a couple bits to a status packet (and this was still in the design phase when things are supposed to be fluid).
--- Ban humanity.
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.
I too read Windriver's whitepaper on embedded Linux and saw it as a ploy to downplay the feasibility of using Linux as a RTOS.
I wouldn't get too excited about anything Windriver does concerning Linux. I recently finished a project utilizing VxWorks 5.5. At every turn we were informed that we didn't currently own the package we needed to do some functionality. Of course the new package would be another $xxxx.xx or more per developer (Often plus royalty). I'm not talking about off the wall support either. Things like write protecting the program text require an additional purchase to be supported.
I'm not saying that Windriver's products are bad. In fact, I'm a fan of VxWorks in comparison to some of their competitors. I'm cautious because Windriver is a wolf in sheep's clothing. (Think Micro$oft of the RTOS world.)
The BSD license may be for friendly for companies that want to use FOSS but it usually isn't for companies that participate in FOSS. What's business friendly about a competitor taking your stuff, adding secret sauce to it, and then freezing you out of a market you may have created?
Linksys has been in a lot of heat over their use of Linux but without distributing the complete source code.
In cases like these, the GPL is a hindrance...and it is easy to see why. They don't want everyone with a computer, an idea, and the appropriate compiler to be able to release their own ROM updates for their devices.
For many of these companies, the GPL is in the way of their adoption of Open Source solutions....which seems self defeating for the OS movement.
clifgriffin > blog
Conspiracy theorists go nuts!
Seriously, who pays this company for what and why should they even care? They bought Walnut Creek CDROM when the consumer Internet connections got fast enough for people to stop buying CDROMs full of free software. Why? Walnut Creek hosted a big FTP server and had some CDROM mastering coing on. Did Wind River need distribution for their products to get them out to a wider audience? Why is there both BSDMall.com and FreeBSDMall.com?
In this day and age you should know to understand a business by the needs it fills and whose cash is represented in sales. Wind River is a mystery. Proceed with caution.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
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.
The GPL was designed to promote Free Software. The idea embodied in this licence, is that once a piece of code is put under the GPL, this code and any descendat of it will be free forever.
The GPL is not intended to promote bussiness or propietary software. If that is your intention you need another license.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
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.
Considering their history, I rather hope that this *IS* just PR work. I'd just as soon that they stayed completely away from any system I plan to acutally use.
Of course, sometimes companies change. But don't believe it just because they say it, don't believe it until AFTER they have proven it.
And even then... IBM has been a good friend recently. But I still keep a wary eye on them, in memory of things past.
Also, consider: Without Sun, OpenOffice.org wouldn't exist. We owe Sun a tremendous debt. But this same Sun appearantly spent quite a large sum of money recently on SCO. While continuing to support OpenOffice.org. If you look at any one action, the motives seem plain, but if you look at several, things get confusing. Because companies don't have a single personality running things, and frequently don't have a unified policy (except when they coerce themselves into presenting one for the sake of appearances).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.