Wind River To Stop Selling BSD/OS 396
David writes "According to an article on Bsdnewsletter.com, OS company Wind River has said it will be stopping sales of BSD/OS on this December 31st, and product support exactly one year thereafter. Only 15 more weeks to grab the final 5.1 update before this piece of history might be gone forever..."
Re:Good riddance. (Score:2, Informative)
Ummmm. FreeBSD? OS X? Come on now, with OS X, we have a flavor of FreeBSD that is now the largest shipping *nix in the world.
Okay, okay... (Score:5, Informative)
BSD Dead? (Score:2, Informative)
Commercial Arm (Score:4, Informative)
The full letter (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's important to keep perspective here (Score:2, Informative)
Also, BSDi has given code up to open source in the past, the BSD auth system being the largest of these contributions.
Re:Speaking from ignorance here... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Speaking from ignorance here... (Score:5, Informative)
We use several of their products at my company to develop MCF5407 systems. Not that I'd buy WR products again though...
Actually, they're really a "aquire and kill" company...over the last several years they've gone on a major aqusions binge, and many of the products of companies they've aquired (mostly competitors, and often with superior products) they've either let stagnate or killed outright.
They are a REAL-TIME company (Score:1, Informative)
They sell the egregiously overhyped real-time operating system VXWORKS, which has reasonable performance (why, it rivals the RT-11 OpSystem DEC built in the 70s!) and a user interface so horrible it makes *nix and IBM mainframes seem positively warm and fuzzy.
One assumes they bought BSD to plunder some techniques and standard API routines... or so that nobody could sue them for any *nix code that might be found in vxworks. What with SCO's recent antics, they are probably feeling pretty clever over at Wind River these days.
--Charlie
Re:Par for the course (Score:3, Informative)
In May 2000, they bought AudeSi [bizjournals.com] for $40,000,000 and Norwegian company ICESoft for $25,000,000
In April 2001, they bought the software assets of Berkeley Software Design Inc. [bizjournals.com]
There's an interesting quote from Business Week [businessweek.com] at this time.
owning the assets of an open-source software company doesn't guarantee gaining access to the talent of programmers in the open-source community
Rather not surprisingly, in January 2002, they sold FreeBSD [com.com]
From Algonet [algonet.se]: Diab Data was bought by ISI who in turn were bought by Wind River Systems. EST Corporation were also bought out by Wind River Systems.
I guess Wind River Systems were just trying to expand to fill their niche market.
Re:This is offtopic, but I have to ask (Score:3, Informative)
This is a running joke that has been going on for a very long time. BSD's imminent death has been greatly exaggerated more than once, and this joke is poking fun at that fact.
On Slashdot, this has evolved into a troll, which you can find information about in quite a few places.
Everything2 has some general information on "BSD is dying" [everything2.com].
Wikipedia has this to say about BSD is dying:
These sites claim that "BSD is dying" is purely a Slashdot trolling phenomenom [wikipedia.org].I'm not convinced that this is the case, however, because there are some earlier examples of this joke (not the troll necessarily, but off-color remarks).
The earliest reference I can find was in 1992, and may be one explaniation of the phenomenom: Responses to survey on the death of BSD [google.com]
There was an article in an online magazine in 1999 that said some disparaging things about BSD's license that may have something to do with phenomenom.
I could not find the article, but it is mentioned here: Debian wants to use FreeBSD kernel [google.com]
There is also a * is dying [hiro-tan.org] page.
Re:Japanese BSD (Score:2, Informative)
BSD is certainly used here, but Linux is much more popular and better known to the public. Of course, Windows and Office is still the default for most people and businesses, though.
Re:Commercial Arm (Score:3, Informative)
*BSD is alive and kicking, news at eleven (Score:5, Informative)
Wind River had trouble dealing with the BSD thing for a long time. Keep in mind that their aim was *embedded* stuff, not the UNIX we all know and love.
In that regard, their announcement is just a move back to a market Wind has been more successful in.
I, too, knew the end was coming when I was one of the five people that received a pink slip in January, and I was (and I still am) worried about what happens to the people left behind. I hope they do well; some have troube dealing with the loss of something they've worked on for a decade or more.
Of the five that have left, many have found a new place, but some are still looking. If you're looking for some *real* good folk, ping them. (I work at a leading Dutch security company now).
I've had a *wonderful* 6 years at BSDI/Wind, and would like to thank the people I've worked with (including customers) for making it happen.
BSD development will continue, it will just happen elsewhere. May the source be with you.
Geert Jan
BSD/OS dead (Score:2, Informative)
We used to run BSD/386 back in 1992 and used BSD/OS upto about 4.1. Around that point BSD/OS started to lag behind in the fast pace of development, but most importantly, in support. When you pay tens of thousands of dollars for licenses with no visible return you tend to start looking for alternatives.
We switched our whole ISP (now around 600 servers) to FreeBSD with little hassle.
It's a shame though, BSD/OS had some cool people behind it.
Cor
*BSD isn't dead in Japan. (Score:2, Informative)
You can see BSD Magazine [ascii.co.jp] and much more
Re:Ah, the memories... (Score:2, Informative)
Why on earth would someone crack and trash a system? There goes the neighborhood.
We switched the machines to Solaris 2.5 x86 (If I recall, it was $700/machine for the license) but you got great stuff including a Windows 3 emulator!
Being a BSD fan, the only thing I really liked about Solaris was
While Solaris was O.K., I had also become adicted to the Free Software Concept. (Side Note, my favorite computers were Amiga and I loved Fred Fish Disks. The Software Distillary BBS was my favorite BBS
After talking to a few people at a HAM RADIO FEST, I picked up FreeBSD which is what all our machines (save a few linux machines for customers who want to run linux for one reason or another).
So, since 1995 we've had two problems, one was that restoring from a QIC tapes on 2.2 series was REALLY SLOW, so the drive upgrade we thought would last an hour, turned into 8. The second problem was insecure file permissions (our fault).
FreeBSD has been a champ, I don't really care about FreeBSD vs OpenBSD vs Linux, I care about how it works.
up 301+16:24, 0 users, load 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
up 502+12:47, 2 users, load 0.08, 0.20, 0.17
up 612+23:09, 0 users, load 0.02, 0.03, 0.00
As you can see, I haven't been woken up in the middle of the night w/ THE SERVER IS DOWN for at least a year. Yes, that's what I care about. It works and works and works.
FreeBSD makes me look good