Programme for innovation and interoperability

Wind River Systems has outlined its strategy to deliver high-value solutions to developers seeking to take full advantage of open source technologies.

Reaffirming its commitment to the shift toward open standards in software development, Wind River Systems has outlined its strategy to deliver high-value solutions to developers seeking to take full advantage of open source technologies.

Wind River has proposed the Device Software Development Platform project with the Eclipse Foundation to accelerate device design development, introduced a project at SourceForge around the open source cluster communication protocol TIPC, and announced continued work with key open source projects - Free Software Foundation, Kernel.org, OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Working Group (CGL) and CELF.

Rounding out an extensive initiative around openness, Wind River has launched the Device Software Optimisation Awareness Programme to foster open innovation and provide global interoperability among connected devices.

As software becomes increasingly complex and time-to-market windows shrink, device manufacturers are requiring development solutions that allow standardisation across multiple projects, operating systems and hardware to reduce costs and allow more time to add competitive value.

In the past, software development practices were often fragmented and required long lead times for developing and running intelligent and connected device software.

Wind River bridges those gaps and addresses the market shift toward consolidation, openness and standardisation.

Integral to this transformation is the incorporation of open source technologies with development tools and runtime environments.

These announcements reinforce Wind River's commitment to reshaping the device software development landscape by promoting the adoption of open standards and facilitating the collaborative development model.

"Wind River has a long history of leading technology design and device development", said John Bruggeman, Chief Marketing Officer for Wind River.

"In just nine months, we have gone from zero to sixty in our efforts to embrace openness".

"By enabling device manufacturers across all industries to benefit from industry standards and accelerate innovation, Wind River is enabling our customers to develop highly sophisticated devices better, faster, more reliably and at a lower cost with all the benefits of open source".

In keeping with a long tradition steeped in setting the device builder's agenda, Wind River is expanding its support of open software development through participation in key open source projects.

By contributing to Eclipse an open framework for device development and offering updates to the TIPC protocol that provides the portability of code between Linux and Wind River's VxWorks operating systems, the company is fostering a collaborative environment to best support the needs of the open source community.

Already a major contributor in the open source community, Wind River is also an active sponsor in key open source initiatives such as the Eclipse Foundation, kernel.org, GNU, OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Working Group (CGL) and Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF).

Industry groups and analysts commend Wind River's embrace of openness as a way to better leverage development investments: "Wind River has made outstanding progress over the past year or so in fostering open innovation", said Jerry Krasner, founder and Principal Analyst, EMF.

"With today's announcements, the company is clearly committed to accelerating the shift toward standardisation and open development solutions, two areas that are absolutely necessary to allow manufacturers to focus more on competitive differentiation".

"Open source enables more innovation and can lower the cost of development and implementation", said Stacey Quandt, Senior Business Analyst and Open Source Practice Leader for Robert Frances Group.

"The development of open standards in open source ensures interoperability, and this holds long-term benefits for the device software market".

"Companies have long been hampered by the need to migrate among incompatible, proprietary operating systems and tool suites to match specific device design requirements", said Rick Lehrbaum, founder of LinuxDevices.com and industry pioneer in the embedded computing market.

"By embracing open source platforms like Linux and Eclipse, Wind River - the largest supplier of proprietary embedded OSs - is helping to simplify device development, a process that has become dominated by spiralling software development costs, risks, and schedule slips".

"The company's new approach, which offers customers the choice of either Linux or VxWorks within a consistent, open development framework, addresses an important need in the market".

"The OSDL strongly supports community-based initiatives by its member companies", said Bill Weinberg, OSDL open source architecture specialist.

"By opening its TIPC implementation, by its strategic commitment to Eclipse, and by its very visible investments in Linux for device software, Wind River shows how companies can build strong business models around Open Source and Linux".

"Wind River's commitment to GCC is demonstrated by its long history of promoting its use with VxWorks and a strong desire to see all of our joint work on GCC made available in the FSF source trees as soon as possible", said Mark Mitchell, Chief Sourcerer of CodeSourcery and the FSF Release Manager for GCC.

"CodeSourcery is proud of its work with Wind River in providing Gnu toolchains for Wind River's VxWorks Edition and Linux Edition Platforms".

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