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Wind River Systems Inc., maker of proprietary embedded operating systems and development tools for creating embedded applications, has announced its membership in two open-source consortia.
The Alameda, Calif., company announced Monday that it has joined the Eclipse Consortium, the open-source tools platform sponsored by IBM, to promote the standardization of embedded development around the Eclipse framework.
Michel Genard, general manager and senior director of hardware assisted and stand-alone tools at Wind River, said, “Weve been watching Eclipse from the beginning and only recently realized it is a very strong, very solid technology for us to take on and to enhance it and develop new products that will be Eclipse ready.”
In February, Wind River will be one of the sponsors of EclipseCon 2004, a conference focusing on the Eclipse platform and related technologies that will take place in Anaheim, Calif.
“The market is growing, and customers need more options to be able to provide more interoperability between different types of tools,” Genard said.
Wind River focuses on five primary markets: aerospace and defense, automotive, digital consumer, industrial and network infrastructure.
It is partly the companys interest in network infrastructure that prompted Wind River to join the Open Source Development Labs, of Beaverton, Ore. OSDL is a consortium of users and technology suppliers working to promote the use of Linux, particularly carrier grade Linux. Wind River will be a part of the OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Working Group, which is working to promote the use of Linux in the telecommunications and networking markets, Genard said.
Wind River sells a proprietary embedded operating system called VxWorks. However, as Linux becomes more popular in the embedded and telecommunications and networking worlds, Wind River has moved to support the open source operating system.
“Over the last two years, Wind River has been quite vocal about Linux and the issue of licensing,” Genard said. “We announced a product that allows you to debug the Linux OS.” In October, Wind River announced visionProbe II, a tool for debugging embedded Linux.
“We want to help people use and deploy Linux faster,” Genard said. “Network infrastructure is our No. 1 market, and carrier grade is an area where Linux is becoming more popular. With these announcements we want to send a signal that we are committed to Linux customers. Well continue to address carrier grade Linux.”