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About 6-7 years ago, Wind River was a big player in embedded software. And then embedded linux came along and disrupted their market. Like most incumbents, they
by bengtan 17y ago
About 6-7 years ago, Wind River was a big player in embedded software. And then embedded linux came along and disrupted their market. Like most incumbents, they moved to the new paradigm (ie. embedded linux) very slowly and at one point, they were stuck in the uneviable position of maintaining their proprietary OS and linux at the same time (ie. double development costs). Back then, the outlook for them wasn't good in light of the trend of embedded electronics manufacturers moving to linux.
Anyway, that was back then. It's been a while since I was in that industry, so I don't know what the recent history is.
- joezydeco 17y agoThat's pretty much correct. WindRiver was gaining a lot of ground recently in the embedded linux area, especially doing baseports of the kernel to new processors. Considering a lot of those new processors are ARM-based and Intel would like some embedded developer love for Atom, it looks like a purely strategic decision. Considering they were part of the Android open handset alliance (I believe they helped with the first kernel on the G1), it'll be interesting to see what happens with future development in that area. Most of the new Android handsets are ARM cores (Google wrote an ARM-optimized libc especially for the system).