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Wind River Transfers FreeBSD to Open Source Group

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Alameda, Calif., January 14, 2002Wind River Systems, Inc.
(Nasdaq:WIND) today announced a definitive agreement to
transfer its FreeBSD operations
to FreeBSD Mall, Inc.
FreeBSD is an advanced open source UNIX operating system, derived
from BSD UNIX and developed at the University of California. Well
known for its performance and reliability, FreeBSD technology is
widely used as a server operating system by many large Internet
sites including Yahoo!, Hotmail, Sony Japan, Apache, Pair Networks,
and Whistle Communications. Like Linux, the source code for FreeBSD
is freely available.

Wind River assumed stewardship for the FreeBSD open source project
in May 2001 when it acquired assets of Berkeley Software Design,
Inc. (BSDi), the former sponsor of FreeBSD. In addition to the
FreeBSD sponsorship, Wind River acquired the proprietary BSD
UNIX-based OS (BSD/OS). Wind River’s interest in the BSDi assets
continues to focus on BSD/OS. Divesting the FreeBSD business further
sharpens that focus and provides continuity and increased support
for FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Mall Inc. is led by its founder, Bob Bruce. Bruce’s involvement with FreeBSD dates back to 1993 when his former company, Walnut Creek CDROM, was the first and primary distributor of FreeBSD.

“The FreeBSD community will be well served by this transaction,”
said Larry Macfarlane, senior director of Wind River’s Application
Platforms product division. “When we decided to divest the FreeBSD
business, we looked for a successor organization that could meet
high standards of customer service and maintain a mutually
beneficial relationship with the FreeBSD community. After carefully evaluating
many interested organizations, we decided that the best way to
ensure the continuity and vitality of FreeBSD was to return it to
its roots.”

Bob Bruce enthusiastically welcomes FreeBSD back home, and
commented, “As we go forward, we will be able to build on strong
relationships and friendships. We have all worked together
before. FreeBSD has a promising future, and I am committed to
helping it reach its full potential.”

Jordan Hubbard,
co-founder of the open source FreeBSD Project also endorses the
change. “I’m happy to see that the FreeBSD Mall will be continuing
without interruption” said Hubbard. “Through this transfer, FreeBSD
will be back under the direction of the same people who started and
know the FreeBSD CD product line perhaps better than anyone.” Jordan
Hubbard is an engineering manager at Apple, where he helps
develop the highly acclaimed Mac OS X, and works on the
open source Darwin
Project
. Both Mac OS X and Darwin are based on FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Mall plans to aggressively promote and market FreeBSD. In
addition to providing the standard FreeBSD distribution on CDROM,
they will continue to offer a subscription service, snapshots of the current
development branch, and published hardcopy editions of the FreeBSD Handbook. They will also offer several levels of professional support and services for FreeBSD.
FreeBSD Mall has placed FreeBSD products in many mainstream retail
stores, including Best Buy, CompUSA, Borders Books, Barnes & Noble,
and Amazon.com. In the near future, they plan to expand their retail
presence, especially in Europe and Asia.

Current support obligations and software subscriptions at Wind
River will be transferred to FreeBSD Mall in this transaction. All
current Wind River employees working with FreeBSD will be employed
by FreeBSD Mall.

Wind River will continue to develop and support BSD/OS, a
professionally engineered and supported BSD operating system widely
used in embedded systems. A major upgrade of BSD/OS that will focus
on meeting the needs of networked embedded devices is scheduled for
release later this year. Wind River will also continue to support
the BSD open source community, and plans to cooperate with the
FreeBSD Mall and other BSD organizations to help promote wide
adoption of BSD technology.

The transaction is expected to close at the end of January.

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