Wind River

Wind River is what’s called the incumbent vendor in marketing speak. Wind River has been in the embedded business since before Linux existed and has a business built on delivering everything necessary for embedded development. In this case, “everything” means software, training, services, legal advice for open source, professional services, development tools for Linux, as well as the company’s other embedded operating system, VxWorks. Wind River’s Linux business model consists of supplying a version of Linux and the root file system that have been thoroughly tested and verified for the target boards, along with packages for supporting use cases like consumer electronics and industrial control. Wind River’s strong suit is its development tools: Workbench. Workbench is a soup-to-nuts development environment that has excellent debugging and system-building tools to help with development. To provide a Linux distribution that’s been tested and validated, the distributions from Wind River usually run a year or so behind the head of line development of the kernel or patches. But not all projects need the latest Linux. Wind River’s product offerings are the most expensive of the lot. For budget-constrained companies, the pricing may take this company out of the running, the value of the services notwithstanding. Because Linux competes with Wind River’s closed source VxWorks operating system, the company has had a mixed view of Linux and open source, to the point of running a “seven levels of open source hell” campaign complete with gargoyles. Over the years, Wind River has warmed to Linux, but it’s still viewed as a secondary offering to VxWorks.

Source of Information : Pro Linux Embedded Systems