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Intel Buys Embedded Software Vendor Wind River
SlashDotDotDot writes "The New York Times reports that Intel will purchase Wind River, the embedded OS and software vendor, for $884 million. 'Wind River makes operating systems for platforms as diverse as autos and mobile phones, serving customers like Sony and Boeing. Intel, whose processors run about 80 percent of the world's personal computers, is expanding into new markets, including chips for televisions and mobile devices. Wind River's software and customer list will pave the way for Intel to win more chip contracts.'"
Their OS, VxWorks, was/is used on many spacecrafts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VxWorks#Spacecraft_using_VxWorks
My philosophy on embedded chipmakers is two-fold. First, they are on a financially insecure base as are the flash memory manufacturers. Second, There are too many embedded chipmakers out there at the moment.
Now where this comes into play is the chaos effect generated by a chipmaker purchasing an embedded software company. This is a strong move in the wrong direction as evidenced by Intel's previous software company purchases. It is interesting to notice how well Intel's proprietary hardware software works, but when Intel begins developing OSes and applications, things will become a little too "black box" and will be hard to support in the future. In this way, it is highly probable that everyone will lose, Intel will shed off Wind River, a lot of people will lose their jobs, and we will be back to exactly where we started!!
Intel used to have its own real-time controls division, with the iRMX operating system written in PL/M and PL/M-86, Multibus and Multibus-II hardware, and a development system that ran on Xenix and MS-DOS. They systematically dumped the whole thing in the '90s, finally handing RMX over to TenAsys in 2000.
Guess it's time for that old second marriage.
Wrong, Wind River bought all Walnut Creek assets, then kicked Slackware to the curb. Patrick had to fire his 2 employees, and go back to a one man show.
All they wanted was BSD, cause they could keep that closed.
No, Wind River was no friend to Linux.
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