BSD employee talks about WIND on Fool thread (message 1082)
What is the general consensus among BSDI employees about the acquisition?
I can only speak for myself, really, but to me it seems like a good thing for BSD. I do a fair amount of "down in the trenches" code dealing directly with hardware, and getting documentation from the hardware manufacturers has been a constant struggle. I understand that Wind River has much more direct access to hardware documentation -- for instance (to borrow from a theme from the conference call), a RAID box from Vendor X might actually run VxWorks internally, so Vendor X works directly with Wind River in making the thing. If they handed me preliminary documentation saying "this is how you will talk to the box once we finish it", I can have a driver ready at that time. In the "bad old days", the box would come out, we would take a month to obtain the hardware, we would take another two months to worm information out of Vendor X ("we wrote a Windows driver, just use that!"), and then we would take another month to write and debug the driver. The product has a 6-month life cycle and 4 of those six months are already gone!
By getting the information early, we can have the software ready when the hardware is ready. Vendor X wins -- they sell more RAID boxes to BSD customers -- and Wind River/BSD win by selling more software to use the RAID boxes.
As for Linux: well, I am not going to make any comments on their code quality. :-) Seriously, the same theme keeps occuring: outside vendors are scared of the GNU licencing (the GPL). BSDi has had an "eBSD" (embedded BSD) product for a while now and has been getting sales, and I understand that one reason for customers buying eBSD over Linux has been the GPL. Regardless of any merits the GPL itself might have, hardware vendors with actual money to spend seem to dislike it, often enough to take their dollars elsewhere. |
