BSD-Windriver

May 2001

Commercial BSD on the move

The major purveyor of the FreeBSD OS CD-ROMs, [15]Walnut Creek, is on
the move again. Last year in March Walnut Creek [16]merged into
[17]Berkeley Software Design Inc, commonly called BSDi, who have their
own commercial version of BSD, BSD/OS. The talk was of BSDi sharing
some BSD/OS technical innovations with the FreeBSD Project, and
perhaps sharing some sources. Now BSDi is [18]selling off the BSD/OS
and Walnut Creek operations to Wind River, the VxWorks real-time OS
company, and keeping its recently acquired Intel-based server hardware
operation. As the BSDi name is going with BSD/OS, BSDi will rename
itself iXsystems Inc after the iXtreme name for its rack-mount
systems.

This appears to be a defensive move by Wind River, who must be
concerned that [19]embedded versions of Linux could make significant
dents in the softer end of the real-time marketplace. As cheap
hardware becomes more capable, it's easier for general purpose OSs to
be good enough for some embedded applications, particularly
less-critical consumer products, where simpler development on a
familiar general purpose OS can be a significant cost and
time-to-market benefit.

The Wind River [20]BSDi FAQ makes interesting reading.

[21]NetBSD and [22]OpenBSD are other open source versions of BSD,
besides [23]FreeBSD. DaemonNews, the BSD news site, has a good outline
history of the open source [24]BSD Family Tree.

While BSD sees very significant use by large Web hosters and ISPs in
our survey, it has not achieved significant mindshare widely, as Linux
has. This limits BSD's successes largely to a few particular areas,
with Internet infrastructure leading, starting from BSD's position as
a TCP/IP research vehicle giving BSD early on one of the most robust
TCP/IP stacks. It will be interesting to see how successfully Wind
River takes BSD/OS forward.

Dogfood

[25]AltaVista switched OS for its primary website to Linux on March
29th, forsaking its previous owner's Compaq Tru64 (nee Digital UNIX)
OS. Tru64 lost its other major reference website [26]Amazon to Linux
last September, and prior to that [27]Lycos switched to Windows last
July. This leaves Tru64 with the [28]Internet Movie Database, an
Amazon acquisition, and the [29]Vatican as its most prominent
websites.

Compaq itself used Tru64 from August 2000 to February 2001 for the
[30]www.compaq.com front-end web server, but then reverted back to
Windows. [31]www.digital.com still stands by Tru64, but simply
redirects to www.compaq.com.

The life-signs of the proprietary Unix brands, other than Solaris, are
not good in our Web Server Survey. Is the end of most proprietary Unix
flavours nigh?


References

1. http://www.namezero.com/
2. http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/index-200103.html
3. http://www.netcraft.com/survey/Reports/200104/overallb.gif
4. http://bulkregister.com/PR/01-03/PR03072001.phtml
5. http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article/0,,3_707581,00.html
6. http://www.atnewyork.com/people/article/0,1471,8511_711901,00.html
7. http://w3.netbenefit.co.uk/news.cfm?DisplayYear=2001&DisplayID=121
8. http://www.netbenefit.com/netbenefitinterim.html
9. http://www.discountdomains.co.uk/
10. http://www.icann.org/tlds/
11. http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5122051.html
12. http://www.icann.org/melbourne/idn-topic.htm
13. http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/01-04-06
14. http://apachetoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-12-20-001-06-NW-DP-LF
15. http://www.wccdrom.com/
16. http://www.bsdi.com/news/press/20000310
17. http://www.bsdi.com/
18. http://www.windriver.com/press/html/bsdi.html
19. http://www.embedded-linux.org/
20. http://www.windriver.com/press/html/bsdi_faq.html
21. http://www.netbsd.org/
22. http://www.openbsd.org/
23. http://www.freebsd.org/
24. http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html
25. http://www.netcraft.com/whats?site=www.altavista.com
26. http://www.netcraft.com/whats?site=www.amazon.com
27. http://www.netcraft.com/whats?site=www.lycos.com
28. http://www.netcraft.com/whats?site=www.imdb.com
29. http://www.netcraft.com/whats?site=www.vatican.va
30. http://www.netcraft.com/whats?site=www.compaq.com
31. http://www.netcraft.com/whats?site=www.digital.com

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.