Wind River Systems, the embedded operating system house that bought Berkeley Software Design Inc (BSDi), the 10-year attempt to commercialize Berkeley Unix, an adventure that doesn’t seem to have netted the company much, has joined the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL).

It’s also joined the IBM-organized Eclipse open source IDE venture, which IBM is supposed to turn over to an independent, elected, full-time, non-IBM executive director next year after spending $40 million on the software. Candidates will be named by the Eclipse board.

Wind River intends to participate in the OSDL Carrier-Grade Linux working group and says it will try to accelerate its adoption in telecommunications. Wind River, which only announced its intention to support Linux in October, says many of its network infrastructure users of its own proprietary RTOS, VxWorks, are moving to Linux. Obviously then its move is defensive.

Meanwhile, one wonders what cute trick the SCO Group has up its sleeve as far as BSDi goes.

SCO has provocatively claimed lately that the copyrights it holds, the ones that it’s going to use to sue major Linux end users, include the code covered by a secret 1994 settlement between AT&T’s Unix System Labs and BSDi.

USL sued BSDi and the regents of the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 for flouting their Unix source code license from AT&T. USL basically wanted to put BSDi, a spin-off of the school’s Computer Sciences Research Group (CSRG), out of business and restrict the distribution of Berkeley Unix to USL licensees.

Their final settlement remains under seal.

USL also licensed Berkeley code for use in System V.

• Eclipse Special: Wind River Systems Tweaks Workbench