Wind River To Stop Selling BSD/OS

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..."

huh?

[qmrq]

What is the big deal here? What makes this "BSD/OS ISE dealy so nifty?

There's always freebsd.org [freebsd.org], and I don't see anything happening to them anytime soon.

And before anyone says "*BSD is dying and is teh suX0rs, Linux forever!" I'd just like to say that BSD isn't going anywhere. There is no x86 based server OS that is as stable, as secure, as highly configurable, as fast, and as powerful as FreeBSD.

It's important to keep perspective here

[RLiegh]

BSDi was NEVER a free (speech or beer) product, and as such really has and had no impact on the free software community. So, while another (some might say 'useless') proprietary software company goes down the shithole, it does not affect the free software movement in any signifigant way.

Free and Net BSD will continue to serve our community alongside of Linux as always, completely unaffected by today's announcement.

Re:What A Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I pay for something I can download for free?

(Sorry to respond to this troll but I feel I must)

You shouldn't -- if you want the program you're using to die, that is. Volunteer OSS projects needs funding; after all, people have to eat and pay the bills you know! Everyone who wants OSS to suceed to should, as often as is possible, either buy physical items (like cdrom's manuals and the like) or donate money to keep the project(s) alive. It's in your best interest if you use the software, and it's also fair to the authors. An exception to this would be if a project is already well-funded (quite rare) for instance if IBM was paying every kernel hacker a decent salary to work on the kernel.

Voluntary donations drive so many of our most precious social services, like charities, public television and radio, and Free Software. Hopefully in the future it will drive artists to produce music. I've always wanted a p2p program that would have a button on the side when you're downloading a song that says "click here to give $1 to the artist.".. but that's going a little off-topic.

Par for the course

[El]

It was obvious from the beginning that Wind River bought BSD, just like it bought pSOS, not to obtain new technology, but rather to eliminate another competitor to VxWorks. (What other technologies has Wind River done this to?) Unfortunately, embedded Linux seems to be ruining Wind River's plans to become the Microsoft of the embedded world.

Re:It had one heydey...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it was geared to a specific release of BSDI. I suspect this was one of the big sellers, and when Gauntlet essentially died of old age (and a company that had no interest in keeping its customers), BSDI lost a big chunk of the market.

Gauntlet didn't die of old age, Gauntlet died because Network Associates sucked and didn't market it very well. Gauntlet is a VERY nice firewall and I'm glad it's technology is going to go into Sidewinder G2. Frankly the other firewalls on the market (Firewall-1, PIX, Netscreen, etc.) are pitifully insecure at best.

Re:BSD Dead?

[crucini]

How about: "Linux is for people who just want to get the job done; BSD is for people trying to prove how 31337 they are."

Only partly serious.

BSD and OS X - good points

[crucini]

Thanks. This issue has been irritating me, and you expressed it well. The idea that OS X is "based on" BSD seems deeply appealing to both Mac zealots and BSD zealots. Definitely a marketing coup.

This topic came up today, and a Unix guy who is programming a MacOS application was there. I asked him, "How much of BSD is used when a normal user uses MacOS X?" (Meaning no terminals). After thinking a moment, he answered "None."

Now he may have missed some odds and ends, but given his background and the fact that he's spending hours a day neck-deep in a MacOS X application, I think he's substantially right.

Re:Where's it go?

[fmayhar]

I very strongly suspect that there's nearly zero chance that BSD/OS will be open-sourced. While the developers (hi, guys!) might want to do that, Wind River the company has shown itself, I think, to be pretty unfriendly to the open-source community. Just look at how the FreeBSD guys got the shaft in 2001.

As for the extinction of BSD/OS, well, when I heard a rumor that it was coming, I credited that rumor pretty strongly. When WR came along to buy us (I worked for BSDi at the time) I was skeptical of the future of BSD/OS there. One word: PSOS. So this news comes as no surprise at all.

The real nasty in this, though, is what it does to the development team. I haven't heard yet what is going on with them, but I doubt that it will be anything good. It could be that Mike, Pat, Peter, Geert Jan and I were just the first to get pink slips, though...

Re:What about F5 BigIP and 3DNS?

[evilviper]

the company paid $80K for it.

Who cares? The value of hardware depreciates very quickly. When Intel processors were at about 100MHz, 500MHz Alpha machines were going for $100,000. Now, you can grab them for $300.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take two chaps with a clue, each well versed in BSD or Linux respectively. Give them each an identical computer to configure with their favorite operating system, BSD or Linux.

When each chap has finished, you will have two stable and reliable machines suited to whatever task is at hand. Performance will be identical in practical terms. And that performance will be limited by the speed of the hardware far more than either operating system can add or detract.

The zealots who claim one or the other is superior might as well be arguing that blue is a better color than red. Such arguments are the stuff of zealotry, not wisdom. BSD and Linux are far more similar than they are different.