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..."
That was quick (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole house was wired up for geekiness. They had terminals in various places and plenty of computers. The AV room had massive speakers, a projection screen, and tons of components. Outside, there was a RCA DSS dish, which had been on the market for less than a year as I recall.
In one of the hallways there were a few gold CDs of various releases in picture frames. At the time, they were still working on the 2.0 release (first one called BSD/OS as opposed to BSD/386, if I remember correctly), so there were only a couple up there.
They certainly seemed to have their business affairs in order. Now here it is and their company has been eaten by another, and now the former flagship product is being killed.
I shut down my last BSD/OS system almost 4 years ago and moved to Slackware, so it won't affect me. I just wonder what happened to them when things were obviously quite good at one time.
SMP (Score:4, Interesting)
Seemed obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, I do not feel that this is a significant loss. The major BSD development is happening in FreeBSD and NetBSD, BSD/OS was never a strong contender.
None the less, this does clearly demonstrate what happens to software that is owned by closed source companies.
Give it a rest, Kevin (Score:1, Interesting)
I wish you would stop posting this crap and just move on with your life. I'm sorry that things worked out the way they did, but you gave us no choice. As it was, I spent a lot of time convincing Jon and Bill not to have you brought up on criminal charges. I even managed to get you a week's severence.
Instead of being grateful that they gave you a break, you have become obsessed with trying to sabotage their business -- but your *BSD is dying posts are just childish and silly. We move more product now than when you left. No one is cancelling orders because of your anonymous messages on Slashdot.
I think that you could still have a bright future, but if this keeps up, Jon and Bill are going to get pissed off and have you brought up on criminal charges. Is that what you want? How many jobs will you get when potential employers see a criminal record that includes the theft of company computer equipment? Jon still has the laptop that he bought back from the pawn shop along with the company's original purchase records for it. He still has printouts of the ads you put up on ebay for the DLT auto-loader and the RAID array. There are records showing that your badge was used to gain entrance to the building at 2:13AM on the day that the equipment was stolen. On top of the thefts, we also have logs showing your attempts to break into the servers using your ID the evening after you were let go.
Do you want to end up being some guy's bitch in prison? That's what may happen if you keep this up. If you think that your shopping mall karate classes are going to do you any good there, you are in for a shock.
Tim
P.S. Please don't bother with denying this, who you are, and so forth. This started practically the day after you were let go. The writing style and the Kreskin reference leaves no doubt as to who's posting this. (Like someone else is going to go to that much trouble to discredit BSD and then not sign their name! Get real.)
Re:BSD Dead? (Score:2, Interesting)
From a users' perspective, there should be almost no functional difference between using a BSD machine, a Linux machine, and a commercial UNIX (Sun, HP-UX, etc) machine. All of the differences that I have seen have been in adminstration. So, even if BSD is dying, Admins will be the only ones to really notice.
Ah, the memories... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I didn't hack it... It was the first server I admin'd that got hacked (circa 1997).
I was a network guy in those days and somehow inherited the admin of that machine (running Livingston Radius!) and managed via unrestricted telnet.
All of my unix experience came from having installed Redhat *once* as a lark, but since in the land of the blind the man with one eye is king, I was it.
I remember seeing all those funny named process in the top display, doing a search on Altavista and then begining to panic.
Eventually we switched over to FreeBSD and Solaris and my interest in unix (and hopefully, my knowledge) grew from there.
Speaking from ignorance here... (Score:4, Interesting)
Who used BSD/OS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Was BSD/OS popular before the free BSDs? I see on their site that they have some information about embedding BSD/OS -- is there a piece of hardware we might all know about, or is it more for internal hardware projects?
What about F5 BigIP and 3DNS? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if they will try to maintain BSD/OS themselves or migrate back?
Where's it go? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What A Surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
That's fairly subtle, considering the events of the last day or so. Bravo, and, I think, a point well made.
There are differences, of course, between publicly consumed intellectual property, like music, and sector-targeted intellectual property, like software: Differences in support requirements, public perception of traditional ownership and rights, the respective industries' take on enforcement and public relations, and the kinds and scope of typical license infringement.
But ... It's still a good point, so I'm a little disappointed that you're not modded up ...
I still love BSDi (Score:3, Interesting)
Of couse now we are moving to FreeBSD and Linux, but it's sad to see an old friend reach the end of it's life. There were a lot of great things in BSDi (like the IPFW firewall syntax - it rocks) but I guess all good things must come to an end.
Fiarwell, my old friend.
It had one heydey... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, make a long story short. Gauntlet ran Solaris, HP-UX, and BSDI, because it actually modified the kernal and several peripheral systems to make it more secure.
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.
Then you add the rise of the really "Free" BSD's and Linux, and that pretty much ended it.
But I'll say that BSDI was one of the most robust, forgiving, stable platforms I ran; a fortune 1000 company ran its entire email gateway systems on a pair of BSDI 4.x boxes running a customized FWTK proxy. They only reason it was retired was because the new guys were only Windows literate and BSDI scared them.
Anyway, I can't say enough good things about BSDI.
Re:It had one heydey... (Score:5, Interesting)
At one point, I seem to recall that Wind River were acquiring Walnut Creek or otherwise taking on the publication of FreeBSD. Whatever happened to that? It seems like they poured blessings all over FreeBSD, then didn't reap the benefits of resultant FreeBSD's growth.
Re:Speaking from ignorance here... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are very few reasons, from a technical perspective, to use proprietary operating systems instead of GNU. Especially with the new Linux 2.6 kernel (with pseudo-real-time capabilities and the uCLinux MMU-less additions), there are more and more reasons to move away from proprietary RTOS for most embedded applications.
Re:Par for the course (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I started using VxWorks almost 10 years ago and always considered it a decent OS. Sure, it's just one big memory space, but in a lot of ways it's a good solid scalable embedded operating system. Are you gonna put it on your PC, hell no. But it's hella good in telecom applications, and anything else that isn't going to need a pretty GUI. Oh yeah, and it supports IPv6 already.
I wouldn't count WindRiver out. With the some of the acquisitions they've made, the embedded Linux people will need some of their hardware and software just for debugging. They may end up being niche players, but they'll still have a share of the pie.
Japanese BSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BSD Dead? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speaking from ignorance here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Par for the course (Score:2, Interesting)
Right, because of all the embedded development sales opportunities that were going towards BSDI??
Let's review. Was BSDI a highly successful embedded operating system? Was BSDI known for being used in realtime and/or small-scaled operating environments across tens of architectures?
Answers: No, no, and no.
Aside: pSOS was bought for tools and customer acquisition. It was a buyout ISI was actively interested because their company was taking on water rapidly. I mean, sure, WRS wouldn't mind eliminating competitors, but that's not how it happened.
Back to BSDI. It's a server OS. Sure, as technology marches onward, what was designed for minicomputers (BSD for VAX) becomes more appropriate for embedded. But where was the developer support for using BSDI in an embedded fashion? The company wasn't laying the groundwork for it. They were focusing on the networking appliance market. The code wasn't generally available either. People who wanted to do BSD with embedded were, as far as I know, using NetBSD. Wasabi, for example, was a customization and consulting group for doing embedded and custom network work with the NetBSD base.
So if BSDI wasn't a competitor, why were they bought? Three reasons: First, VxWorks used the BSD network stack, but their codebase wasn't meeting customer needs (TCP use changes in 10 years.. shock), while the BSDI base had been significantly enhanced. Second, BSDI/FreeBSD had some good talent who know their way around such things. Third, Linux was the rising threat in embedded (the storm surge sagged a bit with the dotcom collapse, though it's still around), and developing BSD expertise was seen as a counter to this. BSD isn't GPL, so some more real concerns in the embedded space go away, and well, there weren't any great embedded Linux companies to buy at the time. Besides, I think the nerds over there were kind of BSD-biased, being old crusty types.
I started using BSD/OS around v1.0 (Score:1, Interesting)
The BSDs are/were nice to use and are robust. For people that like *BSD, there's certainly no danger of them dying so there's no need to switch. Personally, I enjoy the greater support structure and commercial support behind Linux. I wonder if some other entity is going to step up and offer commercial support for BSD/OS?
Cheers,