Wind River Systems
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Type | Public (NASDAQ: WIND) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1981 |
| Headquarters | Alameda, California |
| Key people | Ken Klein, Chairman, President and CEO |
| Revenue | US$328.63 million (January 31, 2008) |
| Employees | 1,507 (January 31, 2008) |
| Website | www.windriver.com |
Wind River Systems, Inc. is a publicly owned company providing embedded systems, development tools for embedded systems, middleware, and other types of software. The company was founded in Berkeley, California in 1981 by Jerry Fiddler and David Wilner. On June 4, 2009, Wind River announced that Intel had bought the company for a reported $884 million.[1] Wind River will continue to exist as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel.
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[edit] Company
Wind River concentrates on middleware: software and operating systems, for information appliances and devices. Their products are used in cellular phones, auto braking systems, routers, digital cameras, projectors, set-top boxes, traffic signals, Mars Rovers MER-A and MER-B and more.
Among their flagship products are the VxWorks real-time operating system (which began as an add-on to the VRTX operating system in the early 1980s), the Eclipse-based Wind River Workbench IDE (which has superseded the previous Tornado environment) and the Wind River Compiler (formerly the DIAB compiler, bought from the Swedish company Dataindustrier AB). Wind River's head offices are located at 500 Wind River Way, Alameda, California. As of 2004[update], their strategic theme is device software optimization.
[edit] Competitors
As of 2009, their competitors include Green Hills Software (makers of the INTEGRITY and velOSity RTOS), QNX Inc. (makers of the QNX Neutrino system), LynuxWorks (makers of the LynxOS RTOS), Mentor Graphics (makers of Nucleus RTOS), and to a lesser extent the real-time and embedded product lines of Microsoft (largely Windows CE and Windows NT Embedded) and various products based on Linux made by MontaVista, TimeSys and others.
[edit] History
Wind River Systems was formed by a partnership of Jerry Fiddler[2] and Dave Wilner.[3][4] In 1981, Fiddler had come out of Berkeley Labs[5] to write software for control systems, but wanted to pursue a career in computer generated music,[6] which he funded through a consultancy business focused on real-time. His early clients included the National Football League and film director Francis Ford Coppola — for whom he designed a unique film editing system.[7] Wilner, a former colleague at Berkeley, joined Fiddler and they formed a partnership called Wind River Systems (named after Wind River (Wyoming) where Fiddler had vacationed that year). Wind River was incorporated in 1983, with each partner contributing $3,000 and a desk to the business.
Their most significant acquisition came in 1999 when they purchased one of their major competitors, Integrated Systems Inc., makers of pSOS. Wind River has since discontinued the pSOS product line and has recommended existing pSOS customers move to VxWorks.
[edit] Products
[edit] VxWorks
VxWorks is the original product of Wind River. It is a real-time operating system intended for embedded devices. It runs on many architectures, and supports features such as SMP, IPv6, TIPC and memory protection.
[edit] Wind River Linux
Wind River's Linux product is source code and a build system that generate runtime images suitable for embedded devices. It supports a variety of architectures, including ARM, MIPS, PPC, IA32 and Sparc.
In 2004, Wind River announced a partnership with Red Hat to create a new Linux-based distribution for embedded devices.[8] Wind River has since ended its partnership with Red Hat and now ships its own Linux distribution optimized for embedded Linux development.
Wind River released the first version of its embedded Linux distribution, Platform for Network Equipment - Linux Edition (PNE-LE) 1.0 in 2005.[9] It was registered against the Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 specification and supported IA32 and PPC architectures. They added other platforms in subsequent releases, General Purpose Platform - Linux Edition (GPP-LE) and Platform for Consumer Devices - Linux Edition PCD-LE) starting in version 1.4.
On March 16, 2009, Wind River announced Wind River Linux 3.0.[10]
On February 20, 2007, FSMLabs' embedded market was acquired by Wind River Systems.[11] Wind River maintains the free versions of RTLinux [1] previously offered by FSMLabs; and Wind River committed to continue to offer the FSMLab approach to RTLinux as part of their product line rebranded as Wind River Real-Time Core for Wind River Linux.
On August 7th, 2007, Palm Inc. announced that it had chosen Wind River Systems as the software solution for its (later aborted) Palm Foleo.
In 2008, Wind River announced cooperation with BMW and Intel for development of a Linux-based open-source platform to control in-car electronics.[12]
[edit] BSD/OS
Wind River acquired the software assets of Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI) in 2001. These comprised the BSD/OS operating system, plus involvement in the FreeBSD and Slackware Linux open source projects.[13] Wind River dropped sponsorship of Slackware soon afterwards,[14] while the FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity in 2002 as FreeBSD Mall, Inc..[15]
Faced with competition from the open source FreeBSD and Linux-based operating systems, Wind River discontinued BSD/OS in December 2003. However, by this time some technology from BSD/OS had been contributed to the open source BSD community.[16]
[edit] Acquisitions
- 1999: Integrated Systems Inc.
- 2000: merge staff of Dragonfly Software Consulting[17]
- 2000: Embedded Support Tools Corp. (ESTC)
- 2000: ICEsoft[18] (Bergen, Norway)
- 2000: AudeSi Technologies Inc. (Calgary, Alberta, Canada)[19]
- 2001: Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI)
- 2005: ScopeTools business unit from Real-Time Innovations[20]
- 2006: Interpeak AB[21] (Stockholm, Sweden)
- 2007: Assets of FSMLabs (Socorro, New Mexico, USA)
- 2008: MIZI[22] (Seoul, Korea)
- 2009: Tilcon Software Limited[23] (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
[edit] Sponsorship
Wind River also sponsors the BASIC WonderCup Challenge, a San Francisco Bay Area science knowledge competition for high school students.
[edit] References
- ^ Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems for Approximately $884 Million
- ^ Jerry Fiddler Profile
- ^ Software On Board Mars Pathfinder Has Berkeley Lab Ties Berkeley Labs NewsletterAugust 8, 1997
- ^ Jerry Fiddler and Dave Wilner at Berkely Labs Photo from 1997
- ^ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 1983
- ^ Lord of the Toasters, Wired (magazine) interview with Jerry Fiddler, September 1, 1994
- ^ Embedded Systems: Jerry Fiddler Change is music to his ears EE Times interview 1998
- ^ http://news.cnet.com/Wind-River,-Red-Hat-team-on-embedded-Linux/2100-7344_3-5163122.html
- ^ http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6024796381.html
- ^ http://www.linux-magazine.com/online/news/embedded_platform_wind_river_linux_3_0
- ^ WindRiver press release on RTlinux
- ^ BMW wants joint effort to develop open-source in-vehicle platform
- ^ Wind River to Acquire BSDi Software Assets, Extending Development Platforms to Include Robust UNIX-based Operating Systems for Embedded Devices, Business Wire
- ^ Slackware Commercial Distribution Left in Doubt as Developers Are Laid Off, Linux Today
- ^ FreeBSD Mall: Company History
- ^ Wind River terminating BSD/OS
- ^ http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Wind-River-Systems-Inc-355080.html
- ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E7DD1131F93BA1575BC0A9669C8B63
- ^ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WUB/is_/ai_60478674
- ^ http://www.windriver.com/news/press/pr.html?ID=1541
- ^ http://www.eetimes.com/conf/esc/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=183701113&kc=2444
- ^ http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4529876314.html
- ^ http://www.embedded-computing.com/news/Mergers+and+Acquisitions/15685
[edit] External links
- Lord of the Toasters an article from Wired magazine
- Wind River's Linux Transformation an article from CNET
