Wind River further embraces Eclipse with developer tools code donation

Deepening its support of Eclipse, and an open-source tools strategy in general, Wind River Systems this week donated some 300,000 lines of embedded development tools code to the Eclipse Foundation. The move simultaneously opens frameworks options for more C/C++ developers and further broadens the Eclipse model's reach into the development and deployment efficiencies within embedded development practices.

The contributions are being made to four Eclipse projects: the C/C++ Development Tools Project, the Platform Project, and both the Target Management and Device Debugging sub-projects within the Device Software Development Platform Project. The code contribution for open access under the Eclipse governance model notably includes a pluggable parser and significant debugging capabilities.

Wind River is apparently mulling additional code donations, but would not share the details. I'd look for more visual tool capabilities, to compete with Microsoft's embedded offerings, as well as advanced modeling benefits, and perhaps offerings that build stronger ties to IBM's Rational solutions. Indeed, a separate analysis of these announcements points to greater collaboration potential and market synergies between Wind River and IBM in the pursuit of DSO.

This week's announcements and their strengthening of an open framework for DSO by Wind River accelerates its strategy of making open source a complementary resource to its commercial solutions and offerings, including the WorkBench IDE and VxWorks RTOS families. A new version of WorkBench, version 2.5, which offers enhanced testing and debugging features, was also released this week.

Wind River also announced this week that its Embedded Linux-based RTOS, Wind River Linux 1.3, is now upgraded to include support for the Embedded Linux 2.6.14 kernel. The RTOS also ships with WorkBench 2.5. The Linux platform (sans a Red Hat collaboration) is available on three levels: for handhelds/consumer devices, for networking (carrier grade) equipment, and also a general-purpose edition. All are based on the same kernel source code, and can exploit Wind River's common tools APIs, for ease in migration and code reuse.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss in a podcast the Eclipse effect and the impact of open-source tool/frameworks on such vendors as BEA Systems and Wind River. Listen to the podcast, "Why Have Large Software Providers Embraced Eclipse," or read the transcript.

Disclosure: Wind River and Eclipse Foundation are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.