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Linux Business Operating Systems Software

Wind River Announces It Likes Linux After All 218

Posted by CowboyNeal from the love-isn't-always-on-time dept.
onecrazyfoo writes "Wind River is going to start supporting Linux in the embedded market. Pretty big news from the largest company in the embedded tools market. What makes it even more interesting is the fact that they have been very anti-Linux and outspoken about it in the past. You can read more about their announcement at LinuxDevices.com." I'm guessing this has come about because of recent changes in the company.
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Wind River Announces It Likes Linux After All More

Wind River Announces It Likes Linux After All

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  • Well well well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:28PM (#7120067) Homepage
    ....look who came crawling back.

    Somebody direct these guys to the "Supplicants" door. =)

    • Re:Well well well... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Only because *BSD is dying. ;)

  • Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cat_Byte ( 621676 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:30PM (#7120086) Journal
    Doing a 180 degree turn that fast has to be hard on the body. It's hard on the hairline when under the sheets too.

  • For those who don't RTFA.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by wo1verin3 ( 473094 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:30PM (#7120089) Homepage
    Found a link off the main article showcasing products embedded with Linux and actually shipping [linuxdevices.com].

  • No wonder (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:31PM (#7120096)
    Linux is stable even when a telnet to root is posted on slashdot as the 2nd post two stories in a row...

    Click here to get Instant Root [67.37.26.119]

    • Re:No wonder (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      only 1 pic in the /porn directory, this has to be fake
    • I just logged in and did:

      echo "/./sbin/init 6" >/etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S01reboot;init 6

      and now the file is missing...(after it rebooted and I logged back on)

      Just out of curiosity, wtf are you doing?

  • Pfft (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:33PM (#7120108)
    They're just doing like LynuxWorks former Lynx with their Blue Cat Linux. I have a strong suspicion that WindRiver just wants to profit from some of the Linux hype, given that, apart from the price, quite frankly, their OS and tool suites are just way better than any embedded Linux suite I've ever seen/worked on/worked with.

    It's just another company trying to jump on the Linux bandwagon. Nothing to see here folks ...

    • Re:Pfft (Score:5, Insightful)

      by El ( 94934 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:37PM (#7120502)
      Last time I checked, the Wind River toolchain I was using (Tornado) was built on top of gcc and gdb. So they added a GUI wrapper to it -- so what? It's still THE SAME tool chain you get for free with any embedded Linux!
    • I worked for LynuxWorks during the name change and release of BlueCat back in 2000, and I'm glad to see they're sticking to their guns and making it into a really slick RTOS.

  • better developer tools (Score:4, Insightful)

    by a no n y man 123 ( 712893 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:34PM (#7120115)
    Hopefully this will mean better developer tools for embedded Linux in the future.

    This [redhat.com] is not enough.

  • Woo Hoo! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:44PM (#7120192)
    Fuckin' A, Linux rocks -- Wasup Wind River! That's right. Bitch, make me a sammich.

  • We should *not* consider this a good thing... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:52PM (#7120232) Journal
    From the comments so far, I will presume most Slashdotters have no experience with WindRiver.

    Exercising great restraint to avoid writing anything they would likely sue me for (such as a factual tale of my experience dealing with them for over two years), I would just like to point out that we should not, in any way, consider this "good" news.

    Aside from their "quality" tools (the fixing of which I can thank for giving me a reason to learn Tcl), expect to hear about a GPL violation within a few weeks. And if they handle that accusation like they handle their customers' bug reports, well, good ol' Darl may start sounding fairly reasonable to deal with.

  • FreeBSD (Score:4, Funny)

    by holzp ( 87423 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:57PM (#7120263)
    "Fine, leave me for that flavor of the month! But dont come crawling back with your uptime goes down!" - FreeBSD

  • Formerly with FreeBSD Wind river? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:58PM (#7120270) Homepage
    This is an actual question, wasn't Wind River one of the major contributors to the fantastic development work done on FreeBSD?

    If so, how could this be _bad_ for linux in any way shape or form? Even if you don't like the company, linux-heads should wake up and realize, any company that's investing in linux and open source is GOOD, look how far FreeBSD has come from 386/BSD and FreeBSD 2.x

    • Re:Formerly with FreeBSD Wind river? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:29PM (#7120460)
      This is an actual question, wasn't Wind River one of the major contributors to the fantastic development work done on FreeBSD?

      Short version, no.

      Longer version: When BSDi fell on hard times around 4/2001, it was sold to Wind River. Many FreeBSD developers made the move. Shortly thereafter many major FreeBSD developers bailed to Apple. The vibe from the higher-ups was that BSD/OS was the "real" product at Wind River.

      Wind River are leeches. Don't expect them to contribute much, if anything.

    • All Wind River did was acquire BSDi (for BSD/OS) and Walnut Creek CDROM (which was silly because that company just redistributed FreeBSD CDs). I don't think Wind River released anything back to the BSD community. BSDi did donate some SMP code from BSD/OS to FreeBSD 5.0, but I don't think Wind River had anything to do with that.

  • They're not the first in this market... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:38PM (#7120506)
    Indeed, the VisionProbe II sounds very similar to some Abatron hardware (a BDI2000, IIRC) I was using to do kernel debugging via GDB a few years ago when working at MontaVista.

    And speaking of -- there are plenty of companies which have been in the embedded Linux market longer than Wind River, and have much more Linux-friendly engineering staffs. MontaVista is one of these, Lineo another... wouldn't it make sense for your embedded Linux business to go to a company that's been focused around Linux from the start rather than just for the last few months?

  • but, host tools? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cycle ( 675816 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:46PM (#7120553)
    Whenever I'm building something on VxWorks, I'm mainly cursing about having to work from a Win or Sun machine. No Tornado for Linux. I would be really, really pleased if they would just release a host-tools-suite for Linux. That would make building stuff for VxWorks a much more pleasant experience. Jumping straight to "embedded linux" support sounds a little like jumping the gun, actually. They've spent 20 years developing VxWorks, it seems to me the most natural and useful Linux support would be to release a Linux-native development kit for it.
    • I wish that WindRiver would release their host-tools for Linux also.

      The project that I'm working on now, was previously done on Solaris, but the Solaris machines (Ultra 5's) are starting to show their age.

      I'd love to be able to build under Linux. One thing that I have thought of doing is getting the gcc source from WindRiver for the version of Tornado that I'm using, and build my own MIPS cross-compiler/binutils for Linux (I don't really need the GUI, since we use a Makefile that's not geneated from the
    • psst, embedded tools hosted on linux [ghs.com]

      and also develop for linux [ghs.com]

      Yes, I work for GHS. They didn't tell me to do this. I'm just out astroturfing of my own volition.

    • Re:but, host tools? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by k8to ( 9046 )
      Back when I was at Windriver, me and another guy over in tech support tried to get Tornado over to Linux, but while we were attempting it, management was deciding to deprecate the other UNIX builds and was busy creating dependencies on the registry and MFC. At the time X libs weren't generally reentrant which was a blocker.

      We got sidetracked and the build stagnated and we never did that final 20%. It would have been so easy with just one person doing it full time. ..

  • Going the way of Sun? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Brett Glass ( 98525 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @10:50PM (#7120574) Homepage
    Sun did a similar thing: it embraced Linux, even though doing so was to feed and support something which was cannibalizing its core business. It is now regretting that decision. Will Wind River? Alas, I suspect so. Wind River has nothing to gain by supporting Linux.

    • Re:Going the way of Sun? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PeteABastard ( 542565 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @11:33PM (#7120819)
      Perhaps they both also have a lot to lose by ignoring Linux. Linux seems to be a disruptive technology, perhaps thier best bet is to build a new core business around Linux, rather than to hang onto their old core business till it is totally eaten.

      Neither Sun nor Wind River were keen to embrace Linux in the past. Perhaps their change of heart is a sign that they see no other choice. It would not be surprising that they regret a decision they feel they were forced into.

      Peter

  • First, Embrace Linux, then... (Score:3, Informative)

    by mark_space2001 ( 570644 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @11:20PM (#7120725)
    ...then Extend and Extinguish, right?

    I don't think of course that they could truly extinguish Linux, but I'm sure they could make some proprietory tools or what not that would make it harder on the competition. I'd in fact expect that this is a pre-emptive strike on their competition, which has probably been gaining on their Tornado tools and WindRiver OS. I even won't put it past them to try to put a few competitors out of business, then start pushing existing embedded Linux users over to their proprietary OS.

  • Didn't they dump Slackware? Are they going to fund it again?

  • " On Thursday, the company announced its first move to support embedded Linux, a version of the open-source operating system that has been tailored to work with small devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants, medical equipment and a variety of other applications."

    Really? A Whole Version?

  • Anti-Linux stance? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by k8to ( 9046 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @02:04AM (#7121550) Homepage
    Maybe I didn't read the right articles, but I saw some belief that the GPL kernel might not mix well with the embedded world, and a perception of Linux being embraced by competitors, which caused them to try the other route: BSD.

    I didn't see any kind of "Linux is no good" message coming from WRS. Maybe I missed some clueless sales-drone speeches?

    The people you see making the pro-linux statements today: especially Fiddler, were making similar noises around the time I left, back in 1999. The attitude hasn't fundamentally changed, they just tried other avenues and they didn't work.

    WRS has long had an idiology that the runtime is not the important piece, but that the tools are where the major development value is. This stems from the origin of the company as a tools provider for VRTX. As a result, they've supported multiple runtimes over the course of the company, at times runtimes provided by alternate vendors. Thus, the Linux thing isn't new.

    What might be new is that the general open source movement is providing more and more sophisticated developer tools for free, such that their custom-packaging of GCC and gui project manager/debugger/etc aren't worth the boatload of cash they're used to charging for it.
  • Too bad, I just got laid off from there back in February.

    At least this is a bit of vindication from the guy who used to wander the halls with the linux shirt. :)

  • Not surprised (Score:4, Informative)

    by gnalre ( 323830 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @03:44AM (#7121816)
    Considering the prices for a vxworks seat I am not surprised. I am sure embedded linux at the low end has been killing them for a couple of years now.
    They also changed there strategy and there "crown jewels". The vxworks source code suddenly became cheaper.

    However there is a lot more to embedded development than just buying a package and putting it on. The things vxworks does do well is it provide a very configurable hardware layer which makes moving to new hardware relatively easy. Also some of there visulation tools such as windview are very good(Oh I wish there was something similar for windows) which allows you to sort out bottle necks.

    However you do pay through the nose for this (and there new licensing model has made it very expensive) and for cheap targets it is just not economic.

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