Wind River's change of heart [LWN.net]

December 3, 2003

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

You win some, you lose some. While the free software community has lost an ally (by some peoples' reckoning, anyway) with the defection of SCO, Wind River seems to be coming around, at least to some degree. Until recently, the company had been fairly critical of the GPL and Linux as an embedded solution. The company surprised many in October when the announcement went out that Wind River would be providing tools for Linux development.

This week, Wind River upped the ante with the announcements that it would be joining two open source industry groups, the Eclipse Consortium and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). Wind River is joining OSDL to participate in OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) Working Group, and focusing on embedded tools that are compatible with the Eclipse framework.

We spoke with Michel Genard, general manager of Wind River's Hardware Assisted and Stand-alone Tools product division about the company's change of heart. Why has Wind River changed its tune with regards to Linux? Genard first explained that Wind River's previous stance towards Linux and the GPL was based in part on fear.

We were not very sure about exactly what to do, and definitely some fear [of Linux], that it would cannibalize some of our business. We had an internal [Linux] project, gave up based on GPL fear and issues. In 2001 we announced acquisition of BSD assets. We thought that what customers wanted was attributes of Linux, delivered with BSD. This year, you know, through a lot of thinking and changes... we realized we were wrong.

Dave Fraser, Wind River's group vice president of products acknowledged in an interview with eWeek that Wind River had backed the wrong horse in trying to supplant Linux with a BSD-derived solution:

The primary market focus is on Linux and not [Unix]. We took a risky bet that BSD was going to be the business-friendly alternative to Linux, but that turned out not to be the case. [Unix] became Betamaxed to Linux's VHS.

Being the Betamax of embedded OSes can be painful. According to the company's SEC filings, its revenue peaked in its 2001 fiscal year at almost $438 million, dropping to $351 million in 2002 and $249 million in 2003. (Wind River's fiscal year begins in April of the previous year.) Wind River seems to be headed for a disappointing 2004 fiscal year as well, with revenue for the six months ending July 31, 2003 falling off by almost $31 million compared to the previous year. Wind River also notes in recent SEC filings that open source may be more popular "where our customer's budget constraints may make such software more appealing than Wind River products for their initial project development."

Recent changes in management also help to ease Wind River's transition to a Linux-friendly company. Kenneth Klein has taken the CEO job after Tom St. Dennis resigned in late June. St. Dennis had been critical of Linux and the GPL, while Klein seems open to working with Linux and the free software community.

As Wind River tries to overcome its past missteps, it will likely face some skepticism. The company's past statements regarding the GPL aren't likely to be forgotten easily, nor the firing of Slackware's development team shortly after the BSDi acquisition.

More recently, Darl McBride has cited Wind River as one of the companies "on this side of the table as SCO is on." Though McBride seemed to be merely citing Wind River since the company had previously criticized the GPL, we asked Genard where Wind River stood on SCO's claims. Genard said Wind River has no position on SCO's claims that the GPL is invalid, but said that the suit was "a wake-up call for the customer."

When you manage and design software, you have to use best practices to understand how you don't contaminate your own code with other IP, whether it's coming from a third-party or open source...but I think we should let the people involved [determine] if the GPL is really enforceable or an issue or not.

There is also some concern that embedded companies are disregarding the GPL, so we asked Genard if Wind River would be working to educate their customers about their obligations when using GPL-licensed code in embedded devices. Genard said that, at the moment, they are only offering tools to develop Linux-based solutions and that the company isn't planning to "do any recommendation to the customer what to do with Linux."

One need not look too deeply to understand why Wind River has changed its attitude towards Linux. Its past strategy of dismissing embedded Linux simply wasn't working, and an ever-shrinking market share was probably not very appealing to Wind River's customers. Wind River is being squeezed on two sides in the embedded space. On one side is Linux, a robust solution that is royalty-free and extremely flexible. On the other side is Microsoft, which outguns Wind River by several orders of magnitude when it comes to dollars spent on marketing and R&D.

Whatever the reasons, it's good to see that a company can change its tune for the better. We hope that Wind River continues this process and becomes an active contributor to the free software community.

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