Wasabi Systems Welcomes Wind River's Endorsement of BSD Operating System.Business Editors NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 5, 2001 Business-Friendly License, Superior Functionality Cited As Reasons For Purchase Of BSDi Software Assets Wasabi Systems, a company that supports and develops the NetBSD operating system operating system (OS) Software that controls the operation of a computer, directs the input and output of data, keeps track of files, and controls the processing of computer programs. for the embedded systems Embedded systems Computer systems that cannot be programmed by the user because they are preprogrammed for a specific task and are buried within the equipment they serve. market, welcomed yesterday's news of the purchase of BSDi's software assets by embedded systems giant Wind River Systems. "Wind River's purchase of BSDi's software assets is a major endorsement of embedded BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) The software distribution facility of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California at Berkeley. , and we are excited that BSD now has such a well-funded spokesman," said Jay Michaelson, Vice President of Business Development for Wasabi. "What's more, Wind River went out of their way to highlight BSD's business-friendly license, in contrast to Linux's GPL See GNU General Public License. 1. GPL - General Purpose Language. 2. GPL - ["A Sample Management Application Program in a Graphical Data-driven Programming language", A.L. Davis et al, Digest of Papers, Compcon Spring 81, Feb 1981, pp. 162-167]. , a point that is critical to us as well." The GPL, or General Public License, requires that any modifications to the Linux kernel The nucleus of the Linux operating system. The Linux kernel, which was developed by Linus Torvalds, was integrated with software from the GNU Project and other sources to create the actual Linux operating system. See Linux, GNU/Linux and kernel. be made public on demand. BSD is free from such requirements; a feature that Wind River spokesmen said was central to their decision to back BSD rather than Linux. "This should allay any concerns people may have that BSD is not ready for prime time not ready for prime time - Usable, but only just so; not very robust; for internal use only. Said of a program or device. Often connotes that the thing will be made more solid Real Soon Now. ," Michaelson added. "BSD has entered the embedded mainstream." There are five recognized varieties of BSD: NetBSD, FreeBSD, Open BSD, and Mac OS X, which are open source, and BSD/OS, which is closed source. In purchasing BSDi's software assets, Wind River obtained the license to BSD/OS and many programmers affiliated with the FreeBSD Project. FreeBSD and BSD/OS are widely used in the server market, powering such websites as Yahoo! and Hotmail, but are of limited use in the embedded market because they run on a very small number of CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. families. "For our customers who run on MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) The execution speed of a computer. For example, .5 MIPS is 500,000 instructions per second; 100 MIPS is a hundred million instructions per second. , PowerPC, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Motorola, or Intel StrongARM equipment, NetBSD remains the only BSD option on the menu," noted Michaelson. "Since FreeBSD really only runs optimally on Pentiums, we see Wind River's open source offerings as complementary, rather than competitive in nature. As with Apple's Mac OS X, Wasabi is delighted to welcome Wind River to the BSD family." About Wasabi Systems Wasabi Systems, Inc. (www.wasabisystems.com), is the premier source for commercial NetBSD development, support and customization, and offers a range of integrated NetBSD system solutions, including support contracts, focusing on the server appliance and embedded systems markets. Wasabi's team includes the world's foremost NetBSD developers, including several members of NetBSD Core and release engineers for the NetBSD project. About NetBSD The NetBSD Operating System is a fully functional Open Source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2 sources. NetBSD runs on 35 different system architectures featuring twelve distinct families of CPUs, and is being ported to more. For more information, please visit www.wasabisystems.com |
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