Wind River Systems, a provider of software and services for connected smart devices, has annoucned definitive agreement to purchase the software assets of Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi), the world's first commercial supplier of BSD UNIX, which is the core foundation for Mac OS X. Wind River says it will continue to support the open-source movement that was embodied in Apple's Darwin.
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FreeBSD and BSD/OS (sometimes known as BSDi) have undergone significant cross-polination over the last few years. And according to Wind River, there will be even more of this in the future as they open the proprietary portions of BSD/OS up to the FreeBSD developers. I can believe this, since Wind River won't be reliant upon sales of BSD/OS for their main revenue stream. If true, this will be a Good Thing. I've used BSD/OS professionally, and it's a great OS. FreeBSD (and perhaps Darwin by extension) can only benefit. And hopefully enough BSD/OS tech will make it into FreeBSD to make FreeBSD a worthy successor if Wind River decides to discontinue development of BSD/OS a year or two down the line.
There's a reason why many embedded systems engineers think of WindRiver as the
Microsoft of the embedded systems market. Their main product is vxWorks,
a real-time operating system. Last year, they purchased their main competitor
(Integrated Systems) and promptly killed the competing pSOS operating system.
I can't think of a more weird combination than the OpenSource BSDi being gobbled
up by a company whose ideals, pricing, and core values are the epitome of
closed source proprietary software. Once you buy into their products, you will pay
yearly license fees, per-seat fees, license management, lousy technical support, and uncertain product plans.
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BSDi NOT the Darwin base
Mac OS X and Darwin are based on FreeBSD _not_ BSDi. From the Apple Developer documentation on www.apple.com/developer
"The BSD portion of the Mac OS X kernel is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features"