Wind River Systems has announced the released of over 300,000 lines of code to the Eclipse Foundation in a bid to help make the restrictions associated with closed, proprietary developer tools a thing of the past. The contributions are being made to four Eclipse projects: 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. According to the company, many of the contributions made will benefit not only device software developers, but will mutually benefit enterprise and desktop C and C++ software developers by accelerating the maturity of the 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. “Eclipse is built on companies leading by giving. 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.”

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 was also released on the occasion. The Eclipse framework makes it possible for developers to leverage more than 400 commercial and open source plug-ins that aid in the design, development, testing and support of device software. Major hardware, software, and device manufacturing companies such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments, have recently turned to Eclipse and the DSDP project as a platform to develop their commercial tools offerings.

“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. “As a Strategic Developer Member, Wind River demonstrates community leadership by contributing code, business and engineering expertise, advocacy, and financial support to benefit the Eclipse ecosystem and the software industry at-large.”

Wind River will continue to offer differentiation in the company’s commercial Wind River Workbench product by providing tools that enable visual configuration of a device operating system and middleware, tools to visually analyze the performance of a running system, software diagnostics tools that accelerate system level testing and advanced multi-core debugging capabilities. New to Wind River Workbench 2.5 are significant enhancements that help customers rapidly develop and test devices based on Wind River’s Linux-based platforms. With Wind River Workbench, developers can “see inside” a running target device to assess system behavior and performance. This functionality shortens edit-compile-debug cycles, for faster time-to-market and higher-quality devices.