Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Tapped by Boeing, Wind River shares the wealth

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Tapped by Boeing, Wind River shares the wealth

TAGS: Application Development, OSes, Open Source

There's some interesting news blowing out of Alameda, Calif.-based Wind River today which could spell big things for the company as well as the open-source community as a whole.

First off, the company has landed a deal with Boeing through which the aerospace and defense behemoth will use Wind River's open-source Platform for Networking Equipment, Linux Edition, for the P-8A Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft (MMA) mission system. The Wind River platform includes Wind River Workbench, the company's Eclipse-based device-software development suite.

The P-8A is a state-of-the-art aircraft, designed for long-range anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, intelligence, surveillance, and recon.

No matter your feelings on the tools of war, you can't help but be impressed that Boeing has given the nod to Wind River's platform to serve as the heart of the P-8A's advanced mission system.

The Boeing deal undoubtedly means some nice additional cashflow for Wind River, and the company is giving something back to the open-source community: specifically, 300,000 lines of code to the Eclipse Foundation.

The Wind River contributions are going toward four projects: the C/C++ Development Tools Project; the Platform Project; and both the Target Management and Device Debugging subprojects within the Device Software Development Platform Project.

"With this contribution, Wind River is demonstrating our belief in the long-term benefits of guiding the DSO [device software optimization] industry towards an open development tools framework," said Steven Heintz, director of product management for developer tools at Wind River.

By no small coincidence, undoubtedly, the code Wind River handed over to Eclipse is derived from the latest version of Wind River Workbench, version 2.5, released just today. Wind River reports that Version 2.5 includes "enhancements to help customers rapidly develop and test devices back on [the company's] Linux-based platforms. With Wind River Workbench, developers can 'see inside' a running target device and assess system behavior and performance."

Wind River Workbench Version 2.5 is downloadable at evaluations.windriver.com.

Posted by Ted Samson on July 31, 2006 12:34 PM

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