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Wind River Partners With Red Hat On Embedded Linux
An anonymous reader writes "According to LinuxDevices: 'Calling embedded Linux and VxWorks 'the standards in device software development,' Wind River today announced a dual operating system strategy that adds a newly developed embedded Linux distribution -- Red Hat Embedded Linux -- alongside its proprietary VxWorks real-time operating system.'"
It's just not the same now that they ditched us desktop Linux users.
Now their main business is selling overpriced licenses for their "enterprise" Linux distribution, which really isn't all that much more bulletproof than most Linux kernels/applications out there.
Sure, I love Linux, but I think the tides may turn away from Red Hat. Gentoo anyone?
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Indeed, Wind River had bought BSDi, which had earlier bought Walnut Creek and acquired close ties with FreeBSD; thus quite a few FreeBSD developers ended up working with Wind River. But the honeymoon didn't last long... I have no idea what went wrong. But even now they claim ownership of the BSD, BSD/OS and FreeBSD trademarks... There has been a long-term plan for the FreeBSD Foundation to get control of the trademark, but I don't know where that's at.
They've got lots of crappy, overpriced proprietary software, and to boot they've tried stealing as much from Open Source software as they could get away with. I look forward to seeing them actually contribute something to the community, but I'm not holding my breath. I suspect they'll be like many of the other big names in the embedded space, who are mostly trying to tie people into their own platforms. I am pleased that I can finally tell the snooty VxWorks developers whom I've argued with over the years "I told you so", though. :)
It was Wind River that didn't want Slackware. BSDi not only kept Slackware to the end, but Slackware was also briefly associated with ixSystems (the last bit of BSDi that remained after Wind River pillaged them, and still remains today I think).
It wouldn't surprise me if this deal is not the "step three profit" that Wind River expects. After that, maybe they'll go the SCO route and claim to own everything. I certainly wouldn't touch any code submissions from them with a ten-foot-pole.
" It's just not the same now that they ditched us desktop Linux users.
See subject title.
"Now their main business is selling overpriced licenses for their "enterprise" Linux distribution, which really isn't all that much more bulletproof than most Linux kernels/applications out there."
Overpriced as opposed to what? A free distro like debian with no real support?
"Sure, I love Linux, but I think the tides may turn away from Red Hat."
Who knows. But it isn't yet.
"Gentoo anyone?"
God no.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"Partners"?
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Wind is doing more than thinking about Eclipse. One of their three major announcements today was for a new Eclipse-based IDE, named WindPower IDE 2. And it supports both Linux and VxWorks, so you're right. VxWorks 6.0 (with process-level memory protection, among other things) was also announced.
Ok, pay attention! Now you have WindRiver, which is the largest "proprietary" RTOS (and yes, RTOS) vendor going with Eclipse. MontaVista, the #1 Embedded Linux house also uses Eclipse. So does Timesys, probably the #2 Embedded Linux house. And QNX, another RTOS vendor was a founding member of Eclpise and also uses then environment. Anyone see a trend here???? This could put other tool vendors really out to pasture really quick with this kind of backing for Eclipse. And now that Eclipse has "cut loose" from IBM, the future looks rather bright. Now, if they would only get CDT running on MAC OS X. . . .
The preemptive kernel work has made the user-space real time variants of Linux, like Hard Hat Linux from MonteVista, more competitive. Vendors now claim worst-case interrupt latencies under 1ms, which is far better than it used to be. But they usually mean interrupt latency for kernel-mode drivers, not response time for user programs. QNX can provide worst case hard real time interrupt response to a user program in well under 1ms. Direct interrupt response is far better. See this benchmark in Dr. Dobbs Journal, demonstrating worst case 8 microsecond (not millisecond) latency over hours of testing on a 200MHz computer.
Linux is getting better at real time. Two years ago it was a joke.
You can download the free version of QNX here. This is for desktop PCs. The cross-compilers and kernels for embedded systems cost money. It's a cute little desktop OS. Even runs Mozilla.
Yes, we've seen before the silly argument of "not dropping an old technology - we're adopting a new one" before. If you'll recall, SCO even spouted this nonsense at one time, when they abandoned Xenix for UNIX. In fact, they even used the exact same words. Xenix died shortly thereafter. :)
"Take things out of Linux"? Do you even know what you're talking about? You clearly aren't familiar with the GPL. Read up on it, and aquaint yourself with why they can't do this without risking opening up their entire source code.
I agree though, we won't see anything useful coming out of WRS.
"Solid embedded engineers" don't work with the crap from WRS. The technology in it is a joke; a poorly implemented mishmash of ideas the developers never fully understood.
"I've not heard of anyone with a sour impression of VxWorks". You are clearly mired in the ooze of WRS. I've never heard a anyone who actually understood OS's who had anything good to say of them.
Take the recent fiasco on Mars. That was such amateurish coding, it is beyond belief that anyone can defend it.
As for them staying in business, yes, so has Microsoft. Monopoly power does that, you know. WRS hasn't had much serious competition until lately. And now they are caving in to Linux. Their history has shown clearly that they've tried to resist it; and probably will continue to do so while the market passes them by.
This is great for the smaller vendors, who know the market better, and can seize the opportunity which WRS has unwittingly legitimized.
I hope WRS does try to tie people to a platform. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to be successful in the Linux marketplace, where you have a greater choice of options.
A kernel hacker of average talent doesn't need WRS or anyone else. Monte Vista's past strategy (which WRS is trying to adopt) has failed, and MV knows this. They are changing, while WRS is trying to duplicate what has already failed. Clearly WRS doesn't know what it's getting into, and it looks like it is well-poised to shoot itself in the foot, while helping everyone else.
Please remain lurking in VxWorks land. You clearly have no understanding of what embedded Linux is about, or doing. And a few classes won't help correct that either.
If you are a solid embedded engineer who REALLY knows how things work and not just a code slinger you can make vxWorks do some very nice things for you.
Same is true for the Linux world. The same statement, exactly, can be made for Open Source development.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --