Wind River and FreeBSD's relationship ending

By Jeremy C. Reed

Back in March, 2000, BSDI merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, the main distributor for FreeBSD. And BSDI had goals to "form a united front for the BSD operating systems. The company will deliver, support and enhance both BSD/OS and FreeBSD."
Then in April, 2001, Wind River bought the BSD properties from BSDi (and BSDi became the hardware company, iXsystems).

As was mentioned in my recent BSD/OS article, BSD/OS was the focus of the acquisition: "FreeBSD came along for the ride and ... gave Wind River a pulpit in the open source community."

Wind River had been actively seeking a partner for the FreeBSD project, said Larry Macfarlane, the Senior Director of the Application Platforms Product Division at Wind River. "Unfortunately, nobody has expressed sufficient interest."


FreeBSD Employees
On Tuesday afternoon, Wind River laid off most of its FreeBSD staff. Today was the last day for twelve employees. Wind River was meeting the payroll for 16 people dedicated to the FreeBSD project. Macfarlane said about ten of these employees were sales-end or distribution related.
The remaining four FreeBSD workers will continue to finish up the pending FreeBSD 4.4 release -- to get it into the "retail channel". Macfarlane expects that 4.4 will be sent to retail stores this month.

He said that after this retail release the remaining employees' future is uncertain.

"At this time, we won't be providing financial aid for FreeBSD," Macfarlane said.

In an internal Wind River memo, several FreeBSD team members thanked Wind River for their commitment to the FreeBSD community by maintaining the staff until FreeBSD 4.4 was released. The memo also said that the economic and business climate influenced this decision.

The memo also expressed the employee's gratitude for being able to work on FreeBSD for the past few months and years.

On a related note, Jordan Hubbard (who had already left Wind River a few months ago) said there are still "people employed by companies scattered around the globe who are allowed to do FreeBSD work on at least a part-time basis."


FreeBSD Hardware
Currently, Yahoo! hosts the main webserver, main mail server, and main source repository (CVS) for the FreeBSD core and developers.
Hubbard said the main FreeBSD servers were all moved to Yahoo! right around the time of the acquisition of BSDi's assets. And he said "Yahoo! continues to donate considerable resources to the project."

Wind River is hosting the Alpha-build cluster, CVSup server, networking test lab, SMP test lab for the SMPng project, and other miscellaneous systems for building packages, testing, and working on the current FreeBSD production.

Some of the hardware will be going home with some of the engineer's being laid off so they can continue working on the FreeBSD project.

Macfarlane said that some equipment, like the Alpha machines, will go to Yahoo!. CVSup and other hardware used by the FreeBSD community will remain up for a while at Wind River.

"The production systems will remain at Wind River at least until 4.4 is released," Macfarlane said. And they will be moved once they can make arrangements.

Hubbard said that the FreeBSD project was lucky to just have a 486 connected to the net when they began.

"Compared to our humble beginnings, we're still doing very well and I also expect any gaps in our engineering efforts created by Wind River's decision to be quickly filled by other volunteers," Hubbard said. "We reached what I'd call 'critical mass' over two years ago and it's going to take a lot more than this to significantly set us back."


FreeBSD Trademark
According to Wind River: "Wind River plans to ensure continuation of the altruistic, open stewardship of the FreeBSD trademark. We feel strongly that the FreeBSD project must be protected and encouraged and that a FreeBSD trademark in the wrong hands could be very detrimental. We continue to search for the best solution. No specific third-party has yet been determined, but transfer to a suitable third-party is the leading option being considered."

Macfarlane said that the Wind River BSD/OS plans are staying the same and that there was no overlap between BSD/OS and FreeBSD developers (other than knowledge overlap): "The projects were cleanly separated."

In addition, Wind River will not be selling new technical support contracts for FreeBSD. But, Macfarlane said, they will continue to provide support for their current customers.

Macfarlane said that Wind River is "no longer proactively looking for companies to sponsor FreeBSD."

Nevertheless, he also said that Wind River still plans to endorse FreeBSD and BSD in general. "We see it as a great alternative to Linux," he said.


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