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Wind River Completes Embedded Linux Metamorphosis
An anonymous reader writes "Embedded software powerhouse Wind River's metamorphosis into an embedded Linux vendor appears to be complete. The company will announce today that it is shipping a pre-release version of its first embedded Linux distribution, and that it has already delivered 1,000 "developer seats" for the Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 compliant software."
...but is Linux really the platform for hard real-time embedded control? I like Linux as much as the next /.er, but it's not the ultimate solution for everything. VxWorks does something very different to most Linux boxes. Let's keep some variety in the world, so we can choose the tool for the job.
That was the old regime. I worked at Wind River in 2002, when they were in dire straits, and met the then-CEO, Tom St. Denis, who was firmly anti-Linux--to the point that, if someone in a meeting mentioned Linux, he would just ignore you, as if you hadn't spoken. (Wasn't just me--other people told me the same thing happened to them.) A while after that, St Denis got fired (okay, "left the company to pursue other opportunities") and the new CEO (Ken Klein) is very pro-Linux. I was at a meeting in December where he spoke enthusiastically about open source, and reminded us that the company wants to maintain a "good neighbor policy" (i.e., let developers devote company time to open source projects.) I think this attitude is the single biggest difference between the struggling Wind River of 2002 and the stable Wind River of 2005.