Wind River lays off FreeBSD developers; Q&A 397
In the interests of full disclosure. I'm also nik@freebsd.org, although not a WRS employee. I was employed by BSDi in Europe, before the European team were laid off as part of the WRS acquisition. These questions were answered by WindRiver's PR department.
Q: WRS has already been through two rounds of layoffs in the recent past. Why this third set of lay offs now? Are the FreeBSD developers the only ones affected?
Wind River has only had two rounds of layoffs. During the second round Wind River decided to divest itself of the FreeBSD project. We spent several weeks looking for a suitable corporate sponsor but did not find any company with sufficient interest and financial capability in this challenging economy. This week's layoff of the FreeBSD employees is therefore Wind River's "final option" in executing the plans set in motion by the second round of layoffs.
Q: WRS currently own the trademark "FreeBSD". Do WRS plan to retain the trademark? If so, why? If not, will WRS let the trademark lapse? Or are there plans to transfer it to a third party, such as the FreeBSD Foundation?
Wind River plans to ensure continuation of the altruistic, open stewardship of the FreeBSD trademark. We feel strongly that the FreeBSD project must be protected and encouraged and that a FreeBSD trademark in the wrong hands could be very detrimental. We continue to search for the best solution. No specific third-party has yet been determined, but transfer to a suitable third-party is the leading option being considered.
Q: WRS own the "bsd.com" domain. Will that be retained?
Possibly. Wind River will continue to invest in BSD/OS and participate as a highly interested member of the *BSD community. As such, the bsd.com domain may be important for Wind River. We are weighing this against the needs of the *BSD community and hope to resolve the issue later this month.
Q: What's happening to the "FreeBSD Mall", at freebsdmall.com?
freebsdmall.com continues to operate and take orders, and all new and existing orders from customers for FreeBSD 4.4 or other products will continue to be fulfilled. Wind River is still evaluating its long term options and strategy for the FreeBSD Mall, but plans to maintain its presence and service either internally or externally.
Q: As part of the BSDi acquisition, WRS will (presumably) have picked up customers who had subscribed to the BSDi CD sets of FreeBSD. Will WRS continue to service those customers, or are their subscriptions now cancelled?
Like all customer contracts, subscription orders will continue to be fulfilled.
Q: BSDi (and, it seemed, WRS) had made some headway in producing additional FreeBSD boxed products to go in to the retail channel. Will WRS continue to do this?
Wind River is currently continuing activities to promote FreeBSD 4.4 through the retail channel. Future FreeBSD releases will probably not be produced or distributed by Wind River.
Q: Will WRS continue to produce the usual 4 disc CD sets of FreeBSD, including one for the recently released FreeBSD 4.4?
Yes, for FreeBSD 4.4.
Q: WRS had been funding work on the FreeBSD Handbook, in order to print the second edition in the near future. [ Disclaimer, I'm co-editor of this work, along with your employee, Murray Stokely ] Will WRS continue with plans to print the second edition of the FreeBSD Handbook?
Wind River will encourage any stewards that emerge to take on FreeBSD publication to complete and publish this work.
Q: WRS houses the "FreeBSD Test Lab" at its Alameda campus. Will WRS continue to host this facility?
No. Some equipment from this lab will be transferred to Yahoo! which hosts much of the build structure equipment for FreeBSD, as well as the primary CVS source repository and main FreeBSD mail server. Wind River does not plan to maintain the FreeBSD test lab at its Alameda, CA headquarters.
What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:2, Interesting)
fsck (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'd like WRS to do is this:
In short, if they are *not* interested in FreeBSD, which seems to be the case, they should just let it be. As others have pointed out, Wind River was mainly interested in BSD/OS, the closed-source BSD. They have got what they wanted, so firing people makes sense... Unfortunately.
Re:What happens after FreeBSD 4.4 then? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems relatively decent, with no obvious problems...
It's somewhat disheartening to see this the same night I upped my box to 5.0...
jeff@boris [2:53am] ~: uname -a
FreeBSD boris.st.hmc.edu 5.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #0: Thu Oct 4 17:49:06 PDT 2001 root@boris.st.hmc.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/BORIS.
merge back to NetBSD or OpenBSD? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, a silly question from somebody who doesn't really follow *BSD:
Is there any chance of some consolidation in the *BSDs? I always thought it strange that there were three of them, but then I don't really know the history behind it.
I'm all in favour of competition, but four free Unix-like OSs (Linux + 3 * BSD) does some a little much to me.
Re:preface.. (Score:2, Interesting)
And look at BSD in comparison and it's absolutly nowhere near death (strong (fanatical) user base, fairly open etc.). BSD will pull through, becuase there are still shed loads of people using it (and unlike those dedicated amigans you dont need any exotic hardward to run it). Ok you don't have the media honey status of linux but I really don't think that is going to stop the platform riding this out. Ok so a bunch of the developers need new jobs (I see this as the main problem, trademarks and getting people to press the CDs are really secondary concerns..) but with the likes of apple taking an interest in the BSD codebase I can't see that these coders arn't going to be of interest to someone..
And I AM a linux person.. I have only ever installed it once exclaimed "oh thats nice" and then blatted it to make room for mp3s :). See we are not all that non-understanding.. Although to be quite honest what you guys really need is Debian BSD, see no corperate whoring no getting ripped off...
Hmm, this again. (Score:4, Interesting)
- Company of bright people gets bought by larger company.
- Larger company fires everyone from smaller company.
- Smaller company no longer exists, nor does their product nor whatever research they were doing.
This just seems awfully wierd to me. It seems to me like you still have the same bunch of people open, aand they collectively have whatever money was used to buy them out; Why don't they just immediately reform back into the company they were? Sometimes there are intellectual property concerns, true, but not if the company subsisted primarily on research or if (like dynamix) they just got completely finished with a product and it was time to start on something else, or if their product is *cough* available under the BSD license. (Except it looks like what happened here was that there was a company that existed to create funding for FreeBSD, and a larger company bought it, took the bits that created funding, and stranded FreeBSD without either funding from them or funding from the funding mechanisms FreeBSD had created.. is this accurate?)I'm not sure what my question was. I'm just looking for comments on what seems like an odd issue to me, and wondering if anyone could try to show me why that if you're a small company with something actually sellable, it wouldn't at this point be a really foolish idea to trust another company enough to let them buy you. Given that you seem to have little proof that you're doing anything other than quietly signing your company out of existence after a three month grace period. I mean, if you just want to get rid of your products and logo, you could sell those things independently of the company itself.
Unless the reason these companies actually get bought is that some larger company wants to destroy a smaller company before they innovate themselves into being a competitor.
Unless the reason these companies get sold is that the CEO wants to quit, and he can get more money by steering the company into being sold than he can in a severance package.
Someone closer to the industry want to explain to me what is happening here?
Does FreeBSD Foundation get a cut? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, WRS has divested the majority of its expenses related to FreeBSD, but will still sell merchandise and profit from it. Anyone know if they plan to contribute financially to the project based upon revenues/profits from the CD sales? Let's Hope...
Re:HP/UX, FreeBSD (Score:1, Interesting)
Get a grip. :)
Merely questions. Living in New Jersey and watching the market get flooded with really intelligent people who have the exact same skillset as I is scary.
First of all, BSD is not dying. In contrary it is growing.
My comment was that FreeBSD was dead and dying. It started when the lead programmer and cofounder left to go work for Apple. It continued when 5.0 was pushed back by a year. Now with this news, I think it's impossible to say that FreeBSD is not dying, and personally I consider it dead.
Personally having used HP-UX I found it a shame HP is moving to Linux instead of HP-UX.
Personally having seen the source code and defect lists of HP-UX, I disagree. HP-UX died when they went SMP. They fucked it up big time, and it took years to get it back under control. Years which were wasted as other unixes went ahead. Actually this was largely due to the BSD-style code which was in the kernel (Sys V was much easier to SMPize), but from the little I know about the FreeBSD kernel they didn't have nearly the same problems as HP-UX.
At this telco I work for our back-end systems will never switch to something like Windows.
Your telco could probably use FreeBSD 1.0. I'm talking about the future.
I still foresee a very bright future since a lot of the people around me start to complain more and more about Windows and where we can push Unix by proclaiming its stability and less idiotic licensing costs, we often win the debate...
NT is getting there. I completely agree that unix is a much better product, but so was Beta (vs. VHS). I'm sure that unix will stick around in some form or another. I know nothing about the NT kernel, but I would assume it has a more tightly coupled GUI, for instance, which would pretty much guarantee that unix will always perform better and be more stable. But I don't even know if that assumption is true, and performance at the kernel level is becoming less and less of an issue with these faster and faster machines.
Don't worry. :)
I'm not worried about unix so much as my own personal career. I'm confident that unix will be around for many many many years to come, but how big of a market it will have and how many people will be hired in it. Where are all these laid off people going to go? Let me know at least that so I can put in my application!
Think Mach (Score:1, Interesting)
It is a bit of an exageration to claim that OSX is based on BSD, given its Mach core and its proprietary Apple superstructure.
Re:Think Mach (Score:2, Interesting)
Mach is a microkernel. You do not know what a microkernel is.
Mach is meant to float between your OS kernel and your hardware. It is there to let your OS kernel interface with the hardware. It is there to provide a layer of abstraction so that os x, and things developed for os x, are less hardware-dependent.
Those are not "BSD compatibility libraries" sitting on top of mach. They are actual BSD code. They were originally a version of FreeBSD, but NeXT/apple has (like with the xMach and mkLinux projects) tweaked the system from being a monolithic kernel to using mach.
If you really care whether what you're talking about makes any sense or not, maybe you should go read some of the excellent developer documentation at apple's website. I suggest you don't listen to anything i've said, as some of what i've said above may have been slightly innacurate and instead find out for yourself what is happening, starting with here [apple.com], which is an overview of the kernel environment of os x and appears to go into the relationship between the mach and bsd portions of the system. There is also lots of helpful low-level documentation linked from Apple's roadmap to Darwin documentation. [apple.com] Had you spent three minutes using search engines, you could have found these documents yourselves.
I'm going back to bed.
Tough Sledding (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hmm, this again. (Score:2, Interesting)
BSDi, having financial troubles (my opinion), tried to get on the open-source bandwagon by buying out Walnut Creak. This was, of course, in the time when having Linux in your product line allowed for huge market valuations. It didn't help them, though it tried.
WRS decided it wanted more technology, and bought BSDi. I think they were interested more in embeded side of BSD/OS, as well as enlarging their customer base. Either way, the FreeBSD side of the house never fit their profile. At least, with BSDi, FreeBSD was based on the same source-base as BSD/OS. Namely, BSD. (Of course.
Either way, this won't stop development of FreeBSD, so it's not exactly what you described. Rather, this cause logisitical problems for a bit until a) the FreeBSD trademark issue is solved, and b) the future of their core servers and how the core members will continue their development is dealt with.
Remember, the different is that this is still an open-source, community involved development project. If transmetal got bought-out and they fired Linus, it would not stop Linux. It would just change some of Linus's logistics. The principle is very similar here. (Except that core distributions were done by BSDi and Walnut creak. Core distributions are not done by Transmetal I believe.)