MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-09-11 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Wind River terminating BSD/OS
|
Just When you thought it couldn't get any worse, this comes along...
Wind River terminating BSD/OS
By Jeremy C. Reed
Yesterday, on the bsdi-users mailing list, it was reported that Wind River
Japan had announced that they will be discontinuing BSD/OS Internet Server
Edition (ISE) on Dec. 13, 2003.
This user commented: "I hope that only WR Japan is going to discontinue
BSD/OS ISE, not entire WR."
But Wind River USA has also sent out emails saying this "is your official
notification that we are initiating the retirement phase for all of our
BSD/OS-based products".
The letter said Wind River had to re-evaluate their products due to the
difficult economic situation of the past few years.
The final version of BSD/OS, BSD/OS 5.1 ISE, will be available as an upgrade
for 5.0 ISE customers in October with sales ending on December 31, 2003.
This will be available in binary and binary with source code, as with
previous releases.
The 5.1 enhancements will include: Kerberos 5, gcc 3.2.2, gdb 5.2.1,
binutils 2.3.1, TCP Segmentation Offload, USB 1.1 support, enhanced DMA bus
support, and Common Access Method (CAM) Layer support.
The Retirement Plan which was included with the letter said that the
standard support and maintenance for all releases of BSD/OS ISE (including
bug fixes and patches for BSD/OS 4.3.x ISE and BSD/OS 5.x ISE) ends on
December 31, 2004.
The letter also said that Wind River will retain the BSD/OS technology.
Some BSD/OS users hope that the code will be released under a BSD license or
transferred to another party.
Some interesting BSD/OS features include its IPFW (not related to FreeBSD's
code of same name) which includes a packet filtering language and kernel
hooks; boot.default/boot.define boot loader routines for boot-time kernel
configurations (based on text files) which is similar to OpenBSD's boot.conf
and FreeBSD's loader; and "Mods" for updating the base system.
BSD/OS already made its BSD Authentication System code available and it is
used by OpenBSD.
Many BSD/OS users over the past few years have been commenting on the list
about their migrations from BSD/OS. Users have made comments like: "Our
FreeBSD migration is almost complete" and "have migrated all BSD servers to
Red Hat Linux 9".
In March 2000, BSDI merged with Walnut Creek CDROM. Then in April 2001, Wind
River bought the BSD properties from BSDi (new name) and BSDi became the
hardware company, iXsystems.
At that time, "FreeBSD came along for the ride and ... gave Wind River a
pulpit in the open source community." Around October 2001, Wind River
stopped providing financial aid for FreeBSD.
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