What's behind Wind River's move to purchase BSDi?
ITworld.com 4/27/2001
Also snagged Eonic of late
George Lawton, ITworld.com
Wind River Systems recently announced plans to acquire two operating system vendors to expand its embedded systems offerings; the company currently offers only VxWorks. At the high end, Wind River acquired Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi) for its Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix core. At the other end of the spectrum, it acquired Eonic Systems for its Virtuoso DSP OS technology. BSDi will change its name to iXsystems when the sale is closed.
Wind River plans to continue to offer a popular FreeBSD version of the OS via iXsystems, after the acquisition.
The BSD/OS kernel is a POSIX-compatible Unix that is used by 90 percent of Internet service providers and more than 100,000 commercial Internet customers, including Yahoo, GeoCities, Uunet, Intel, and About.com. The kernel was originally developed at the University of California at Berkeley and released in 1993. BSD is at the heart of most modern versions of Unix, including SunOS and Mac OS X.
Wind River does not intend to discontinue the FreeBSD version, and will continue to include technical innovations from the commercial version at ftp.freebsd.org, and as a shrink-wrapped product available at retail outlets. In order to maintain FreeBSD's momentum, Wind River will be retaining Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick, chairman of the BSDi board; Jordan Hubbard, BSDi's chief evangelist and vice president of open source technology; and Michael Karels, chief technology architect at BSDi.
Curt Schacker, vice president of marketing and corporate development at Wind River, said the company has been on the prowl for a high-end OS for some time. They had considered Linux, but were concerned about the GPL license, which mandates that developers make all of their code available to others. The BSD license allows developers to retain the rights to any modifications or improvements they make.
"In the embedded space, a lot of the differentiation and innovation is really code developed at the kernel level," said Schacker. "One of the things we felt strongly about is that if you were required to take that potentially differentiating software and had to turn that code over to the open source community, you would be at a disadvantage."
At the other end of the market, Wind River wanted to be able to participate in the growing mobile applications arena.
"The Eonic technology basically fills in the missing pieces for Wind River," said Schacker. "We think we now have a portfolio of operating systems that allow us to span the entire market, from low end to high end and everything in between.
After these mergers, customers will be able to use the Tornado development environment to create applications that run on Unix, VxWorks, and Virtuoso. Another benefit is that developers will be able to use a single set of libraries to create functions that run on any of the platforms. |
