Wind River going up, up, up! Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!

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To: Allen Benn who wrote (9712)	5/25/2001 7:25:15 PM
From: lkj	Read Replies (2) of 10309

Hi Allen, This is not a response to your post. This is a portion of a message from a friend who knows a lot more about Linux than me. We had this dicussion weeks ago. Regards, Khan ------------------ Well WindRiver didn't exacly purchase 'BSD' they purchased the developers of one of the commericial BSD flavors BSDI. This certainly has some implications for WindRiver but none for Linux. Remember that vxWorks is completely based off of an old version of the FreeBSD kernel and continues to use drivers from FreeBSD development. BSDI develops a commerical BSD UNIX and several of the developers that work for BSDI are leaders in the FreeBSD project. This will certainly buy them some excellent developers who are very good at what they do. I think that WindRiver needs to control the focus of BSD development a little more to suit some of the higher-end capacity markets they are going after. I don't think it is a bad acquisition at all. Why would they discount Linux? Well part of the reason is that they would hate to see people invest in a lot of the evolving embedded versions of Linux. Redhat with past purchase of Cygnus has really surprised WindRiver. Please be aware that Cygnus and WindRiver have worked with each other much in the past with regard to cross platform/target compilers as well as libraries. Now Cygnus has been working on eCos and other RedHat related projects. I can see them also being afraid of the 'open source' mentality. Since WindRiver demands huge amounts of money for their source code to just pieces of their OS/libraries/drivers. They have certainly lied through their teeth saying that anybody developing for Linux cannot sell their IP or keep it. What you CANNOT do is take Gnu Public License code (GPL) and merge it with your own without making your code public. But that is an irrelavant point since libraries that ANY program links against are not under GPL, they are under another license called LGPL or Library GPL. Which allows you to link to a GPL library without having to display or distribute your source code at all. Remember you don't have to use the GPL or LGPL license if you don't want and any drivers you write for linux don't have to be either. NVIDIA as an example release their proprietary graphics drivers/libraries for Linux and you don't have access that anything that is their IP. Look at others like Adobe, Real Player, Symplicity, Corel Wordperfect etc... none of these guess from high end EDA tools, word processors, or multimedia apps/drivers has released a line of code.

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