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Wind River CEO Unexpectedly Resigns 71

Posted by Hemos from the going-on-with-bidness dept.
The Finn writes "According to Electronics Weekly Wind River CEO Tom St. Dennis resigned today and left Wind River. For those who forgot, Wind River assumed stewardship of FreeBSD as part of the BSDi acquisition in May 2001, and subsequently Cut it loose in January 2002, and it still sells BSD /OS 5.0. I'll avoid the speculation of BSD dying, but Wind River may not be looking so good."
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Wind River CEO Unexpectedly Resigns More

Wind River CEO Unexpectedly Resigns

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  • License contradiction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rapiere ( 235287 ) on Thursday June 26, 2003 @09:15AM (#6302346) Homepage
    Quite sad to see Wind River in trouble ("The companyâ(TM)s revenue declined 20 percent last quarter" - Electronic News) as it decreases FreeBSD deployement among enterprises.

    I don't know much about other firms using BSD (like Wasabi Systems [wasabisystems.com]) however it seems it's more difficult for them to sell BSD systems compared with Linux distributors.

    Quite contradictoraly, BSD license is more "liberal" than Linux from the enterprise point of view which can use the code with minimal restrictions (FreeBSD License [freebsd.org]) Wind River and Wasabi Systems gives a generous access to their proprietary source to some bsd developpers)

    As Linux gains momentum, I hope IT managers will see those nice BSD lurking around, using them, and helping maintaining them (like hiring developpers to work on these systems).
    • You should of course read "However Wind River and Wasabi Systems gives a generous access to their proprietary source to some bsd developpers".

      If some admin could modify my post, I grant him my benediction.

  • Well... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was forcefull migrated off BSD/OS to FreeBSD a week ago. Perhaps things at Windriver aren't so great and the word is out?
    • by who, why ?

  • Slashdot double standards! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Thursday June 26, 2003 @09:38AM (#6302568) Journal
    So it's "news for nerds, stuff that matters" when the Wind River CEO resigns unexpectedly (I use FreeBSD and I don't have any idea who they are), but it's not "news for nerds, stuff that matters" when VA Linux CEO Larry Augustin resigned unexpectedly?

  • WindRiver are not related to the FreeBSD project. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26, 2003 @10:27AM (#6303091)
    WindRiver never, ever had any involvment with the FreeBSD project. What they bought was the FreeBSD merchanidise business that originally had been started by Walnut Creek and was subsequently owned by BSDi. WindRiver subsquently sold the FreeBSD merchanidise part of the aquisition to FreeBSD Mall who are still selling FreeBSD merchandise. What happens to WindRiver is of no relevance to FreeBSD in the slightest, and they had nothing to do with the project itself at any time, they just bought out one of the many FreeBSD merchandise comapanies that exist.

  • He was pretty good... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Thursday June 26, 2003 @10:40AM (#6303226)
    When I worked at Applied Materials many years back, he ran the division I was working in. Although I never directly interacted with him, I found his management style well balanced and his speeches inspiring. Looking back, I would have no qualms about working under him again.

  • Wind River dying? GOOD! (Score:5, Informative)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) * on Thursday June 26, 2003 @10:59AM (#6303427) Homepage Journal
    Sorry, but I have the misfortune of using Wind Rivers' VxWorks real time OS. I've have very little luck getting support from them (usually I have figured out the problem myself long before they can respond). Their hardware support is poor, their disk I/O layer is abysmal, their compilers out of date, and they are way too expensive for what you get. They don't have USB drivers (unless you want to be a printer, not a controller), they don't have SMB drivers, they killed their embedded X server (guess what I needed!), their board support packages don't (imaging a BSP for a Strongarm that does not even enable the cache!)

    If I had it all to do over again, I would have used an embedded Linux rather than VxWorks. Granted, I work on some pretty large and complex systems that are just too much for VxWorks.

    If you are doing a smaller system, use something like eCOS or RTXC. If you are doing a larger system or a system that must be networked, use QNX , BSD or Linux.

    • Re:Wind River dying? GOOD! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why would you be doing some of the things you say you want to do with a real-time OS? An RTOS is not the same thing as an OS. The whole point is the real-time capabilities. If you can use Linux to solve your problems, you don't need an RTOS. Are you just trying to find an OS to run your big complex system or what?

      That said, you left out some OS suggestions: if you need a truly tiny-footprint RTOS, you can't get much smaller than Express Logic's ThreadX. And if you need a guaranteed-rock-solid high-rel

    • Re:Wind River dying? GOOD! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by The Vulture ( 248871 ) on Thursday June 26, 2003 @02:14PM (#6305266) Homepage
      Good to know that I'm not the only person who had problems with WindRiver support from time to time.

      One thing to keep in mind though (and many of my colleagues share this view) is that the actual RTOS is very good, but the other things aren't. Unfortunately (for the company I worked for), WindRiver bundled things in such a way that it was seen to be more convenient to use their built-in IP stack (for example) than buying a third-party one. Some developers spent months trying to debug WindRiver's routing stack, versus buying a working solution, since it "just made sense to be a complete WindRiver shop". Let's just say that management's decisions have almost driven the company out of business (parts of it are being acquired, what's left is expected to be around for no more than two months).

      Yes, their BSP support is somewhat lacking, but, at least for us, they were one of the few companies that could get us a BSP that supported the Broadcom 3350 CPU (MIPS3K based).

      When I talked to a QNX tech at the Embedded Systems Conference, he explained their support for the Broadcom 1250 (the core we were using at the time), it made WindRiver's RTOS seem absolutely laughable.

      -- Joe

    • I have always wondered why Wind River keeps supporting BSD/OS and dismissing Linux. Linux is hot. The embedded market is hot. Why doesn't Wind River provide a road map from old RTOSs to their new Embedded Linux? Instead they are letting little companies like Monta Vista stake Embedded Linux as their speciality. Wind River has more embedded customers and brand name recognition than Monta Vista. Because of the GPL, Wind River could even make use of most of Monta Vista's Linux contributions.

      • To be accurate, WRS Never "supported" BSD - their OS is completely different.

        They bought Walnut Creek, a distributor of, among other things, BSD.

        As to why not support Linux - simple. The WRS mindset is "Screw them for the money, screw them for more money, then screw them for money again." Supplying a product that others can get in on would be a violation of that model.

        Keep this in mind: WRS aims to be the Microsoft of the embedded realm.

        • Re:Wind River dying? GOOD! (Score:3, Informative)

          by DES ( 13846 )
          To be accurate, WRS Never "supported" BSD - their OS is completely different. They bought Walnut Creek, a distributor of, among other things, BSD.

          Actually, they bought BSDI, maker of BSD/OS, then sold off all the bits BSDI had acquired from Walnut Creek. And they did have a number of FreeBSD developers on their payroll for a while.

          • This isn't surprising (the part about FreeBSD developers on the payroll).

            While the core OS itself was written from scratch, a lot of the periphery code (i.e. network stack, device drivers, etc.) come from one of the BSD's (I can't tell which one though, since I haven't bothered to read all of the code). And, judging by some of the dates in the changelog, they haven't been updated in a *long* time.

            -- Joe

      • Wind River has more embedded customers...

        I thought that this fact had more to with a series of acquisitions in the past than with providing a good product.

    • I was introduced to VxWorks when my previous employer asked me to port some drivers (ISA, PC-104 and PCI) for it. My overall impression was that it provided some nice libraries (multi-processes, semaphores, sockets, pipes, networking, as well as low-level IO) and was a piece of cake to get set up. It was Tornado, the IDE for VxWorks, that sucked. At best I was able to ignore it... at worst I actually had to use it.

      I really don't know what the dev team was thinking when the released it. Its a total visu
  • Someone needs to post about how Tom St. Dennis only has 40,000 red blood cells, down from 100,000 last year. Someone? Help?

  • VxWorks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <`imipak' `at' `yahoo.com'> on Thursday June 26, 2003 @12:57PM (#6304571) Homepage Journal
    Their RTOS - VxWorks - is, or rather was, very powerful. I've used VxWorks for fairly significant projects twice - once in '91 and once last year.


    The OS in 1991 was pretty decent. Things were up-to-date, and it was the best thing VME had going for it. (VME is a great standard. Pity about the companies implementing it.)


    Last year, though... That was another matter. VxWorks was unreliable and unstable. (I don't care what my boss at the time claimed - I was needing to reboot the VME crate repeatedly, and that's not acceptable. That's worse than my coding!)


    IMHO, VxWorks has had a good run. It's been around a long time, it has had some wonderful moments, but somewhere along the line it took a wrong turn. It's time Wind River accepted this.


    Wind River also does need to cash in a reality check or two, when it comes to pricing and support. We are NOT living in the boom times, we are NOT living in the early 1990's, when competition simply didn't exist and companies could charge what they liked and get away with it.


    Even Microsoft is beginning to feel the pinch, and that's impressive, given that it has enough spare cash to function at 100% capacity for the next three to four years without selling a single thing. That's just the loose change!


    *BSD isn't dying, it isn't even remotely close to it. Although the kernel does need some serious work, as technology is moving ahead faster than the coders.


    That's true for Linux, too. Progress in the field is outpacing the kernel coders by miles. That's not good, because it means certain hostile companies can out-flank these efforts, by simply skipping a generation or two of technology and going to the latest. We've seen that more than once.


    What's dying is the rate of development, as a function of the rate of technological change. That's not unusual when projects get very large. The larger a project, the more effort it takes to add even small components. Too much interaction to check for and debug.


    Wind River will likely vanish. By pricing itself out of the market, creating hostile public opinion, and by not building up the programming staff required to keep the momentum going, it will kill itself.


    FreeBSD'll move elsewhere, bruised but otherwise unharmed. It'll be set back a little, though, as it'll take time for the politics to work out.


    The underlying issues, though, are universal to all software writers:

    • If you aren't moving forwards, you're moving backwards.
    • If you are moving forwards, it'll take increasingly more effort to do so.
    • Moore's Law applies to silicon. Murphy's Law applies to software.

    • FreeBSD'll move elsewhere, bruised but otherwise unharmed.

      Move from where? They have no association that I know of with Wind River. See link at top about it.
  • -Linux will soon be owned by either IBM or SCO...
    -Windows was never alive
    -BSD is dying...

    guess we have to go back to AmigaOS again

    • Re:does not look good... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're a hoot! Really though, speaking as a FreeBSD/*BSD zealot, GPL-hater, and a Linux-doubter, the AmigaDOS of old is dead, dead, dead--but that doesn't mean some old fans of the OS couldn't bring it back to life in a new, slightly different form in the same way Mr. Torvalds did with U**x. BSD/XFree86/Darwin teams all offer a lot of code that ought to be reused in other places as well as in *BSD/OSX/X11. I'm finding myself becoming more and more hostile to the notion of the "One true OS" or the "One tr

  • WindRiver != {Free,Net,Open}BSD (Score:3, Informative)

    by MythicalMan ( 261975 ) on Friday June 27, 2003 @07:42AM (#6310044)

    Yet another "BSD is dying" FUD at /.

    Confusing WindRiver with the FreeBSD Project is a silly mistake.

  • St. Dennis ousted by board (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Finn ( 1547 ) <agrier@poofygoof.com> on Friday June 27, 2003 @12:09PM (#6312504) Homepage

    Now electronic news is reporting [e-insite.net] that St. Dennis was ousted by the board.

  • Not entirely off-topic, I admit, but Wind River has offered a desktop-version of their GUI toolkit called "Zinc" for free use (with certain ristrictions). So I'm curious: has anybody here had any experience with Zinc? Is it any good?

    http://www.windriver.com/products/zinc_for_deskt op /index.html
  • We use vxworks here and from our perspective it has a number of problems.

    Firstly they have been trying to push a subscription scheme from there old licensing model. For existing projects this works out as very expensive(10,000 per seat per year).

    Support can be poor and updates unreliable. We recently had some poor drivers which took ages to debug and a poor network stack. Until recently source code was a very expensive optional extra, so leaving you very stuck waiting for vxworks to get there act together

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