News and New Products

Wind River Opens Code to Open-Source Community

By Richard Wilson -- Electronics Weekly, 7/31/2006

Wind River’s support for the open-source software community continues with the release of more than 300,000 lines of code to the Eclipse Foundation.

The software and tool supplier is committed to the open-source community and it said its aim was to “make the restrictions associated with closed, proprietary developer tools a thing of the past.”
 
The company said that the contributions to four Eclipse projects will benefit not only device software developers, but will also benefit enterprise and desktop C and C++ software developers by supporting an open industry standard development framework.

“As a strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, Wind River is committed to making an ongoing investment in Eclipse through our technology and engineering capital, as well as financial support,” said Steven Heintz, director of product management for developer tools at Wind River.

“With this contribution, Wind River is demonstrating our belief in the long-term benefits of guiding the DSO industry towards an open development tools framework,” said Heintz.

The contributions being made to four Eclipse projects are: the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) Project, the Platform Project, and both the Target Management (TM) and Device Debugging (DD) subprojects within the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) Project.

The code contributed by Wind River is derived from the latest version of the company’s commercial, Eclipse-based device software development suite, Wind River Workbench 2.5, which is also released this week. Wind River Workbench 2.5 is shipping today and you can download an evaluation copy of Wind River Workbench. 

According to the company, the Eclipse framework makes it possible for developers to access more than 400 commercial and open source plug-ins that aid in the design, development, testing and support of device software.

Some hardware and software companies recently turning to Eclipse and the DSDP project as a development platform include Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments.

“The Eclipse Foundation relies on the contributions of its members to provide an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director, The Eclipse Foundation.

Electronics Weekly is the London-based sister publication of Electronic News.