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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Church who wrote (5381)	6/5/1999 11:33:00 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Comments on Tornado pricing posted on Yahoo earlier this year by an RTOS user... Tornado cost by: poachfurbies 733 of 2381 messages.yahoo.com Benda111 makes great points. My experiences with the freebies, and the low costs, and the old school are similar. The freebies and low cost kernels may be Ok if you have a small project and don't need anything particularily advanced. The more expensive RTOS are much more complete and come with things like board support packages (so that you don't need to port the code yourself) professional support (nobody is quite "there" yet, but as Benda111 says at least Wind seems to have recognized it as an issue) and lots of valuable features to accelerate your development (either extra OS facilities so you don't have to write as much code, or good tools so you spend much less time getting the application correct). Cheap products like Nucleus are great kernels for small applications. But you need to port it since the device support isn't there, there are zero tools, weird support, and you end up paying a royalty anyway if you use one of their optional products. All these add up to hidden costs so it's important to get an apples to apples comparison. I'm now using Tornado II beta, and I think Wind has a winner on their hands after the buggy original Tornado (at least on my NT desktop). And for grabs they throw in an integrated version of WindView and the VxSim simulator in the basic package! Try to go back to another kernel after using these for a while! When this goes out to the general world it should be fun (both for customers AND shareholders!!!) Another great thing in Tornado II is they seem to have fixed the basic kernel scalability problem where VXWorks was too big. Informal trials show that you can just ask Tornado to scale the system real small according to only the services your app needs (Wind call this autoscale). Now that's cool. My remaining beef with Wind after 3 weeks of exposure to Tornado II relates to pricing. They need to come up with a better way of making it available in my company or we'll never ever proliferate it. Why oh why they can't adopt the same model as all the other s/w development stuff I buy I don't know. Someone there needs a kick in the b**t :-) IMHO. Especially since they'd probably make more money that way. PF Posted: 01/29/1999 03:11 pm EST as a reply to: Msg 730 by benda111 Wind licencing by: poachfurbies 748 of 2381 messages.yahoo.com Windfan et al, Actually I'm not complaining at the overall cost of Wind's products, it's the way they are licensed and the way you have to buy them. Wind tries to restrict you by the project you are building, so if for example we were making a "Furbie-II" we would dump down some cash for the rights to do so and make the F-II. Then the theory is that when we want to make the "Furbie-III" based on the outrageous success of the previous model we want to use Tornado. But you have to buy it all over again. In my previous company we opened up the license so that this never became an issue although the Wind rep told us this was a one-time agreement ;-) With all the other software I buy you get to buy it once and it stays bought. Wind should adopt this model before it eats their shorts. As opposed to upsetting their customers or have a open ended Furbie license, they'd make money from additional engineers joining the team and annual maintenance, not to mention royalties from the F-II series! For us today this is the main issue stopping widespread adoption. I've told the Wind reps this and they just cross their eyes in denial. Oh, and T2 should go to "FCS" in March according to Wind (which probably means April or May based on previous schedules quoted). PF Posted: 02/01/1999 11:10 am EST as a reply to: Msg 734 by windfan