Wind River Systems

Vendor of the VxWorks family of RealTimeOperatingSystems. Also bought out vendor of pSOS (Note: The page PsosOs refers to something else), which they promptly discontinued. Dabbled a bit in BerkeleyStandardDistribution. Seems to buy out one obscure software tools company per quarter.

Wants to be the MicroSoft of EmbeddedSystems, allegedly. Like MS, are losing market share left and right to LinuxOs. Also like MS, are busy trying to convince the IT world that the GnuGeneralPublicLicense causes global warming, cancer, acne, warfare, and BritneySpears?.

• Update. Recently, WRS underwent a change of strategy. The former CEO who advocated the anti-Linux strategy was fired, and nowadays, WRS is in the embedded Linux business; and peddles Linux alongside their existing "hard" RTOS's. Like other embedded Linux vendors (ie MontaVista?), they make $$$ from tools and support, not from runtime royalties.

However, this firm is unlikely to disappear any time in the foreseeable future, mainly due to installed base and the fact that VxWorks, while far from perfect, is so much better than anything else out there for real time development. Oh, well. Until something better comes along...

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