This time, Wind River is touting a new release of their “Commercial Grade Linux” product line. WR’s Linux offering is always based on an unmodified version of Linux (in this case 2.6.14 replacing the company’s previously-supported 2.6.10). As such, each new Wind River release gains the benefits of the new Linux release in addition to the new features and patches that WR has included in its add-ons. According to the company’s announcement, 2.6.14 includes ” …hardware-specific drivers for additional processors and boards, updates to development tools, real-time performance and scheduling-related patches, high resolution timer patches, security, networking updates to IPv6, IPsec, and Mobile IPv6, the uClibc library to reduce footprint and memory consumption, and dynamic power management.”
Wind River has clearly put a lot of thought into their open source strategy over the past couple of years. They offer a build methodology that allows their customers to customize and add patches to their Linux build while maintaining a path back to the original source. This helps overcome the divergent source problem caused by development teams modifying open source software and then trying to track those updates in the face of subsequent releases of the underlying code base. In addition to full source code, Wind River also packages a number of binary reference platforms for various target architectures to speed customers’ race to running Linux-based systems.
Of course, testing, packaging and distributing open source software can help to create droves of satisfied customers, but by itself it doesn’t make much of a business. Wind River also has a clear strategy to fully support the open source community’s efforts and products and then to apply their own expertise in adding market-specific value to those offerings for device software developers. In this announcement, Wind River is stressing two segment-specific packages for Linux – consumer devices (including mobile handsets and digital media devices) and Linux-based network equipment. Both of these segments are seen as high-growth areas in which Linux is a reasonable OS choice.
On the consumer devices side of the house, WR is distributing “Wind River Platform for Consumer Devices,” which includes a small-footprint, fast-boot runtime version of Linux aimed at the memory-constrained devices typically found in the mobile and handheld segment. This version is already optimized for hardware platforms popular in the consumer area such as Intel and Freescale. The company claims to also be working with a number of partners to provide key components of consumer device environments like user interfaces, baseband communications stacks, and a variety of applications and software services.
In the networking segment, Wind River is touting its “Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition 1.3.” This package distributes a kernel with networking applications, file systems, management, and security features required by communications and networking applications. They also include support for ATCA telecom systems and for cross-platform development. Wind River says the platform also follows the guidelines for prioritized functionality as defined by the SCOPE Alliance’s Linux Operating System profile. With this platform, WR says they are targeting a wide range of networking and communications applications, including control and management system software in 3G infrastructure systems as well as IMS, WiMax elements, Fixed-Mobile convergence, soft switches, media gateways, DSLAMs, cable modem head-ends, and multi-service switches.
The company is also working with the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) in both focus areas – one to help drive standards for a Linux-based mobile phone platform called “Mobil Linux,” and on the networking side they’ve registered with OSDL for the “Carrier Grade Linux” (CGL) 3.2 specification. Cooperation with such organizations seems to have become a way of life for Wind River, in sharp contrast to the silo-based, proprietary practices of the company in the past.
At the same time as the Linux announcements, Wind River is also announcing that they’re moving over 300K lines of code into Eclipse, an industry-standard open source software development framework. As with most big contributions, the donation is both altruistic and self-serving. By giving such a large chunk of well-crafted code to Eclipse, they’re making a tremendous amount of embedded- and device-software specific capability available for free to the world at large. Over time, however, the company will reap the benefits of the open source community’s ongoing maintenance and enhancement of those capabilities. Most importantly, though, WR’s contributions help make the open source platform more open.
The contributed code is derived from the latest version of Wind River Workbench 2.5, and it enables the use of plug-ins for device software modules from Wind River and a number of third party vendors. By adding an additional level of openness to the open source offering, Wind River also paves the way for themselves and other embedded software development companies to add commercial value as extensions to the Eclipse framework rather than competing with it.
Taken together, this series of announcements paints a picture of a company that is defining a successful model for the cooperative existence of open source and commercial interests in software development. They also add more spans to a bridge that will increasingly allow device and embedded software developers to take advantage of the features and capabilities developed by both open source and proprietary concerns for the much larger desktop and enterprise software segments. The more the embedded community can piggyback successfully on the technologies and investments of the software development community at large, the more time and resources we in the embedded space will have to focus on the development of technology where we truly add extra value.
