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Wind River terminating BSD/OS
By Jeremy C. Reed Yesterday, on the bsdi-users mailing list, it was reported that Wind River Japan had announced that they will be discontinuing BSD/OS Internet Server Edition (ISE) on Dec. 13, 2003. This user commented: "I hope that only WR Japan is going to discontinue BSD/OS ISE, not entire WR." But Wind River USA has also sent out emails saying this "is your official notification that we are initiating the retirement phase for all of our BSD/OS-based products". The letter said Wind River had to re-evaluate their products due to the difficult economic situation of the past few years. The final version of BSD/OS, BSD/OS 5.1 ISE, will be available as an upgrade for 5.0 ISE customers in October with sales ending on December 31, 2003. This will be available in binary and binary with source code, as with previous releases. The 5.1 enhancements will include: Kerberos 5, gcc 3.2.2, gdb 5.2.1, binutils 2.3.1, TCP Segmentation Offload, USB 1.1 support, enhanced DMA bus support, and Common Access Method (CAM) Layer support. The Retirement Plan which was included with the letter said that the standard support and maintenance for all releases of BSD/OS ISE (including bug fixes and patches for BSD/OS 4.3.x ISE and BSD/OS 5.x ISE) ends on December 31, 2004. The letter also said that Wind River will retain the BSD/OS technology. Some BSD/OS users hope that the code will be released under a BSD license or transferred to another party. Some interesting BSD/OS features include its IPFW (not related to FreeBSD's code of same name) which includes a packet filtering language and kernel hooks; boot.default/boot.define boot loader routines for boot-time kernel configurations (based on text files) which is similar to OpenBSD's boot.conf and FreeBSD's loader; and "Mods" for updating the base system. BSD/OS already made its BSD Authentication System code available and it is used by OpenBSD. Many BSD/OS users over the past few years have been commenting on the list about their migrations from BSD/OS. Users have made comments like: "Our FreeBSD migration is almost complete" and "have migrated all BSD servers to Red Hat Linux 9". In March 2000, BSDI merged with Walnut Creek CDROM. Then in April 2001, Wind River bought the BSD properties from BSDi (new name) and BSDi became the hardware company, iXsystems. At that time, "FreeBSD came along for the ride and ... gave Wind River a pulpit in the open source community." Around October 2001, Wind River stopped providing financial aid for FreeBSD.
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