> * Wind River Systems (purveyors of VxWorks, which used to be THE
>   embedded OS, but is rapidly losing market share to systems without
>   per-unit royalties) has announced they're buying BSDI -- which of
>   course includes Walnut Creek, historically FreeBSD's sugar daddy.
>   It's not immediately clear what this means to us, but I'm sure the

Well, if the FreeBSD support isn't managed well, it could mean massive
waves of refugees hitting our shores at some point.

>   next year will be... interesting.  I'm told there's at least one
>   article that ponders why they didn't pick up NetBSD (given that it
>   already runs on `everything'), but I haven't actually gotten a
>   reference to it yet.

How about:
	http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5510476.html?tag=owv

	BSD has been making some inroads into the embedded realm with
	companies such as Wasabi Systems using NetBSD. 
        Wasabi said Wind River's move is good news for BSD, but argues
	that NetBSD is a better foundation than FreeBSD because NetBSD
	is better designed to run on a variety of different CPUs. 

In the embedded O/S market, the recent Linux explosion has been shaking
things up for over a year. The BSDi purchase makes sense even if Wind
River only cares about countering the "Linux invasion" because BSDi has
been fighting Linux in the server space for considerably longer than
they have been dabbling in embedded with "eBSD".

> will not continue.  Unless some way is found (donations, grants,
> whatever) to diffuse the cost, it is unlikely that I will be running
> any more trade show appearances.  I simply cannot afford to both spend
> the time and pay the expenses myself.

I say take the PBS route. I'm sure a bunch of us could spare a few hundred
a year -- we probably already blow that much on NetBSD-related toys anyway.

People aren't going to send money to a black box. We need to know how much
this stuff costs, so we know how much our gift is really helping.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com