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Wind River Moving Towards Linux 100

Posted by Hemos from the sizing-each-other-up dept.
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.
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Wind River Moving Towards Linux More

Wind River Moving Towards Linux

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  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:31AM (#7598367)
    Guess they are trying to get full value out of thir $699 payment.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

  • Wasnt wind river one of the SCO posterchildren (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:34AM (#7598382)
    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.

    • 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:

      "[...] Anybody who owns an operating system that thinks it shouldn't be for free, uh, would naturally fall on this side of the table that SCO is on. So it is not just Microsoft, it is Wind River Systems, it's Sun Microsystems, essentially anybody who thinks that their valuable intellectual property in an operating system should have a price tag on

      • OK. He thought that he was being reasonable that time. After all, everyone *must* want to smash dangerous competition...

        Actually, he probably is, sort of, right. But most people seem to believe that "fair" competition should be met honorably. And it's often possible to turn things into a win for most, or all, parties. Customers, somehow, often aren't considered as part of the relevant parties. But I count them that way. Of course, I don't own a business...

        And there is substantial evidence that SCO

  • Plan A or Plan B Linux Adoption Strategies (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:37AM (#7598410)
    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.

  • SCO (Score:4, Interesting)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:42AM (#7598444)
    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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • "stay with Windows"?

      Do you mean as a development host platform?

    • Re:SCO (Score:2, Informative)

      by a.ameri ( 665846 )
      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 d

  • Not a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RoboOp ( 460207 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:45AM (#7598468)
    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.
  • ...shether they will run awry with the restrictive nature of the GPL.

    Unless they want to provide their source code for all, their migration to Open Source may stop just short of Linux.

    Clif
    • Somehow "whether" became "shether".

      Mucho apologies.

    • Re:Me wonders... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Andy_R ( 114137 )
      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 delivere

      • Re:Me wonders... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by clifgriffin ( 676199 )
        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.

  • lets hope this is not just Wind in sales...
    • dust .... wind ....dude

    • Re:Despite the name (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) *
      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

  • Slackware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by epcraig ( 102626 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:49AM (#7598490)
    Until Wind River is endorsed by Patrick Volkerding, their good intentions will be for naught in Slackware quarters.

    Slackware had some very insecure months after Wind River took over Walnut Creek and cut Slackware loose.

    • Re:Slackware (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh yeah Wind River, the company the pissed on Slackware. The same Slackware I use everywhere, and specifically used to create an embedded system in a very expensive military box.

      Oh, right, screw you Wind River.

      JoeR
      Got Slack?

    • Re:Slackware (Score:5, Interesting)

      by smed ( 252644 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @10:52AM (#7599027)
      oh...yeah. After the way Wind River strung Patrick & Co. along for nearly a year before cutting them loose, seriously stalling his meticulous development efforts, I can't possibly support anything this company puts its grubby little hands into.
      Screw them.
      I doubt this effort is going to improve their rapport in the Linux community anyway. Imagine...taking one of the finest and most stable Linux distros avail and tossing them out on their asses to fend for themselves...and then deciding 2 years later that it might have been a mistake.
      Even if Patrick sprinkled this with Holy Water.....I'd never feel comfortable doing business with such short-sightedness.
      Again...screw them.

  • I love Eclipse (Score:4, Interesting)

    by niall111 ( 449279 ) <programmerchris@gmail.com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:52AM (#7598506) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:I love Eclipse (Score:2, Funny)

      by grub ( 11606 )

      Pretty sweet IDE compared to my years of using visual studio

      I like SCSI compared to my years of using Code Warrior. Oh wait, sorry...

    • Re:I love Eclipse (Score:3, Interesting)

      by molarmass192 ( 608071 )
      I'm confused, you're doing Java development and they were considering buying Visual Studio? Isn't that a little like trying to mix oil and water? Does the new VS.NET even support Java, I thought it only supported J#, the MS Java bastard step-child?
      • You can use VS5/6 to write Java code. The key point to remember is M$ stops at v1.1. What you do is use VS as the syntax checker/editor but you save your files on a Unix/Linux box and you use the Java compiler of your choice v1.3 or v1.4 on the Linux/Unix box to compile and create your class files, a Makefile will take care of this.

        I use VS to edit c/c++ and Java code but all of the code is compiled on Unix/Linux boxes.

  • GPL is causing Wind River wariness of Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Cryofan ( 194126 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @09:57AM (#7598537) Journal
    THis article [linuxdevices.com] highlights another example of the GPL causing corporate wariness of Linux:

    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?

    • Re:GPL is causing Wind River wariness of Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FatRatBastard ( 7583 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @10:09AM (#7598602) Homepage
      What are the options for revising the GPL, if any?

      Why revise it? Its not like its the only software license in the world, or for that matter the only "open" license. If Wind River doesn't like the GPL it can always use BSDi (which it owns) or anything else under the BSD license. Problem solved.
    • What makes you think the GPL needs revising? What kind of control freak are you to even think of revising a license used by millions of people? Why don't you just go invent your own license?

      Keerist, the gall of some people ... if you don't like something, fine, do your own, but to think of changing other people's choice because you don't like it .... keerist in a bucket

    • 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

      • Personally, I'm of the opinion that ANY monoculture is dangerous. And this includes a monoculture of licenses. Fortunately there are many. Just off the top of my head:
        BSD, GPL, EiffelForum, Artistic, Modified GPL (as used in GNAT), LGPL, MPL, NPL, ... I believe that there are about 15 that have already been approved. Personally, the GPL is my favorite, but it should, perhaps, have a modified version that says "In case the GPL is found invalid, this software may be used under *designated licence* except
    • 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.
    • "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.

      Translation:

      "More customers are telling us that they see interesting aspects to Linux . . . but we're seeing a growing problem due to the fact that GPL does not let us take other people's ideas, make money off them, close off the source, and then dump the develope
    • The GPL protects Linux, and us, and all the thousands of developers.

      Linux, the kernel and most of the components to make up a complete OS, are essentially free software, for us to use, imporove on, build on. People spent a lot of hard hours on this software.

      So tell me, why should we "revise" the GPL and allow corporations to take Linux, label it something else, and sell back to people, closed source? They didn't write Linux, they didn't pay for it, so they shouldn't be able to do this.

      If a company wan

  • Who'd of thought it would come to this? (Score:5, Informative)

    by theoldmoose ( 553227 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @10:00AM (#7598560)
    As a recipient of one of the local Wind River's sales office's highly anti-Linux sales pitches, my boss, who is generally neutral about such things, was particularly put off by the condescending attitude on the part of the sales folks and the white paper they were circulating. The effect was that they were taking us as a bunch of uneducated fools, because we might be considering using Linux in an upcoming embedded project.

    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.

  • not TOO suprising (Score:2, Informative)

    by afidel ( 530433 )
    Considering that GCC and the GNU toolchain has been used for much of their crossplatform development kit for a while now.

  • All I know about Wind River is... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @10:16AM (#7598641) Journal
    ...that we use VxWorks extensively around where I work, and everytime we need some minor addition to an embedded application, it's like we asked the software engineers to sacrifice their own mothers to some dark Old God. And it isn't even like it's *real* embedded applications where it's all solid state and firmware and PROMs. This is stuff like VXI Slot 0 PCs with hard drives and monitor/mouse/keyboard ports.

    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).

  • Wind River and open source (Score:5, Informative)

    by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <(csabamolnar) (at) (gmail.com)> on Monday December 01, 2003 @10:16AM (#7598644) Homepage Journal
    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 [slashdot.org] 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 [daemonnews.org]) is not quite flourishing.

    • Business Friendly License (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @10:31AM (#7598805)
      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?
      • That is incorrect. I would like to point out IBM HTTP Server [ibm.com] as an example of a project that a company (IBM) participates with that has a BSD/MIT style license.

        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?

        That is why it is usually one company that is heavily involved with any particular GPL project. As they hold the copyright, they can still release proprietary releases (StarOffice). Any other comp

      • This is pure FUD. No one can make BSD code proprietary. Yes, they can add their own stuff to it, and keep their version to themselves. But the origial code is as free as it ever was. The only way for a competitor to "freeze you out" is for them to enhance the codebase to such an extent that you can't do so yourself. And at that point I think there might be a credible argument that the creator of those enhancements deserves to profit from them if they wish. You may argue differently -- I've no problem with

  • Windriver Sales Tactics (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @10:25AM (#7598729)
    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.)

  • Wind River == WIN DRIVER (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aphor ( 99965 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @11:05AM (#7599151) Journal

    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.

  • Keep the River out of Linux! (Score:4, Informative)

    by frostfreek ( 647009 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @11:12AM (#7599228)
    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.
    • Even more frightful, I've seen embedded "designs" that actually made use of one task diddling in another tasks memory! It's so wonderful when companies are willing to hire anyone as an embedded designer...it's like 'doze, no?!?
    • Actually... There is an MMU package that you can purchase for VxWorks 5.5 that supports memory protection. Oh, by the way... It's not standard (It costs a pretty penny)! :)

      As to the shared memory for each task... You can actually create private task evironments using VX_PRIVATE_ENV as an option for taskSpawn. Just remember that any device drivers initialized with handles in a task will no longer be available once that task shuts down! ;-)
  • For those of you who have done embedded development with Wind River OS products (vxWorks) in the past, this looks like too little, too late.

    Not only did they fight the open source movement for some time, but now that they are hurting they look to embrace it. Those of you who have tried to work with Wind River tech support to solve problems with device drivers and software issues have probably experienced the frustration and head banging of trying to get results. The lack of support, secretive nature of the
  • I thought TRON [slashdot.org] was the embedded shiznit. What gives?

  • somwhere in a smoke-filled room at Slashdot headquarters... Eclipse is buying banners... let's be sure to mention Eclipse in some stories.

  • If MS does not get the results it wants out of WinCe what would be the easiest way for MS to gain embedded market share?

    Buy out Wind River and migrate WR's customer base to WinCE.

    But if WR makes it much easier for their customers to move to Linux, and many of them do, Linux will have beaten MS handily in 2 areas (servers and embedded).

    2 reasons for MS to buy WR - increase their own market share and deny Linux that market share.

  • Haven't they realized yet, the problem that is distribute Free Software embedded systems?

    It really sux, you must provide a way to upgrade firmware, so you need to provide an interface. That's not easy.

    To tell the truth I don't know exactly what is needed to be in conformity to GPL, but I'll tell you a thing, allow firmware upgrades in certain devices is not easy, and in many cases will increase product price.

    Imagine yourself upgrading your FreeSoftware-CarStereo.

    I hope they find easy ways to do suc

  • In a sales meeting with the WindRiver folks, we were discussing our options for a Realtime OS on an upcoming project. We laid out some of the problems we'd had with them in the past and their response was "we suck, but we suck less than the other guys." We got a kick out of this after they left.
  • How does joining the Eclipse Consortium have anything to do with "moving towards Linux"? Eclipse runs under lots of operating systems.

    Graham

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