Wind River Removes BSD/OS From Market

If you cant beat em, join em. After spending the past three years campaigning against Linux and the dangers of its GNU General Public License, Wind River Systems Inc. has given in. The company in October released a version of its visionPROBE II hardware-assisted debugging tool for VxWorks, the first in a series of its developer tools that it says also will work with Linux. Wind River also announced that it will remove its BSD/OS from the market, effective immediately; support will continue until June 2004.

Dave Fraser, Wind Rivers group vice president of products, attributed the reversal to market realities. “Linux has found an incredible foothold in embedded,” which has brought about a change in philosophy at the company. “We had a belief that the GPL and IP issues were going to be [a problem] for embedded” development, he said, which led to Wind Rivers acquisition of the software assets of Berkeley Software Design Inc. in 2001. However, BSD/OS failed to gain traction for the company, Fraser indicated. “The primary market focus is on Linux and not [Unix]. We took a risky bet that BSD was going to be the business-friendly alternative to Linux, but that turned out not to be the case. [Unix] became Betamaxed to Linuxs VHS.” Fraser said the staff formerly working on BSD development already has switched to Linux.

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