Wind River has launched a new community site for Wind River Linux customers, engineers, and embedded Linux community experts. The Wind River Developer Community for Linux is designed as a collaborative site where Wind River Linux users can ask and answer questions using a point rewards system, the company says.

The Wind River Developer Community for Linux provides a platform for exchanging ideas, news, technical information, and best practices regarding the use of Wind River Linux and embedded Linux in general, says Intel subsidiary Wind River.

Designed for all sizes of companies and all types of users, the site will spotlight Wind River Linux resources, open source ideas, community experts, and customers, says the company. Over time, Wind River adds, it intends the site to act as a repository for best practices related to Wind River Linux and embedded Linux.

Wind River Developer Community for Linux home page
(Click to enlarge)

The site currently offers a general forum area, as well as a question and answer forum and a content sharing page. Users are encouraged to contribute answers to questions through a point system, and question originators can view all answers to a given question.

Once an answer is supplied, the user who posted the question is asked to mark the reply as being correctly answered or as being "helpful," says Wind River. Only one answer can be marked as being "correctly answered."

Correct answers win four points, and helpful answers win two points, says the company. Currently no awards or prizes are offered for top point earners except for the admiration of one's peers.

The site was developed after discovering that the top request in Wind River Linux user surveys was for "an active, well-maintained content-rich discussion group," says Wind River. In addition, the site appears to be an answer to MontaVista Software's "Meld" site, which launched in March 2009 and was upgraded to a Meld 2.0 version earlier this month.

Meld appears to be the more ambitious effort, with MontaVista attempting to establish the site as a general embedded Linux developers site. In reality, however, it appears to be largely a collaboration forum site for MontaVista Linux developers.

Wind River Linux, which is currently available in a year-and-a-half-old version 3.0, is by some counts the most widely used commercial embedded Linux development platform.

The Linux distribution includes a set of pre-configured system profiles for industries such as aerospace and defense, consumer, industrial, networking and medical. Version 3.0 features include upgraded real-time and multi-core support, as well as a Kernel-based Virtualization Machine (KVM).

Availability

The Wind River developer page blog announcing the Wind River Developer Community for Linux site may be found here, and the site itself should be here.

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