SANTA BARBARA, Calif., 18 January 2005. Green Hills Software, Inc. announced today that Wind River Systems, Inc. has sued Green Hills Software to force the termination of the 99-year cooperative agreement between the companies.
For more than 10 years, Green Hills Software and Wind River cooperated to provide joint customers with Green Hills Software's MULTI and AdaMULTI embedded software development tools, including debuggers and compilers, for use with Wind River's VxWorks operating system.
Many critical national defense programs use MULTI and AdaMULTI with VxWorks, including the F/A-18 Hornet, F-15 Eagle, and AV-8B Harrier fighter jets. Green Hills Software will stand behind its commitment to these and other customers by fighting Wind River's lawsuit.
"Green Hills Software and Wind River made a commitment to support our joint customers for the life of their products," said Dan O'Dowd, founder and CEO of Green Hills Software. "To demonstrate our mutual commitment, both companies signed a 99-year cooperation agreement. Green Hills Software has always fully complied with the terms of that agreement.
"Under the last four Wind River CEOs, we received the VxWorks updates that we need to fulfill our support commitment. However, as soon as the latest regime took over, they breached the agreement by refusing to supply us with new updates, interfering with our ability to support our mutual customers. Wind River also filed a lawsuit in what appears to be an effort to intimidate us and our customers who depend on MULTI and AdaMULTI for VxWorks. After nearly a year of fruitless negotiation, it appears that litigation is the only way for us to get the VxWorks updates we need to support critical national defense programs that use MULTI and AdaMULTI for VxWorks."
Green Hills Software has filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that Wind River has adopted an illegal plan to monopolize the market for Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for VxWorks by engaging in a series of activities to drive Green Hills Software out of the VxWorks IDE market.
In addition to preventing Green Hills Software from obtaining VxWorks updates, Green Hills Software alleges that:
* Wind River has libeled Green Hills Software by telling customers that Green Hills Software decided to drop support for MULTI and AdaMULTI for VxWorks. In fact, it is Wind River that has failed to provide Green Hills Software with VxWorks updates.
* Wind River has engaged in false advertising by issuing press releases claiming that their Workbench 2.0 is "the first and only cross-platform IDE to support VxWorks, Linux and other in-house operating systems." In fact, for many years, MULTI has been the leading cross-platform IDE with support for VxWorks, Linux, and in-house proprietary operating systems.
"To add insult to injury, Wind River has named their new debugger 'Multi-X'," added O'Dowd. "Wind River can't misappropriate 13 years of goodwill built up in our MULTI product name by tacking an 'X' onto the end of it. How long would it take General Mills to sue someone who dared to introduce a new breakfast cereal named Wheaties-X?
"Wind River has been unable to defeat MULTI for VxWorks in the marketplace, so now they are trying to stop MULTI for VxWorks in the courtroom. We have no choice but to pursue vigorous litigation against Wind River to protect our customers, our trademarks, and our reputation from Wind River's baseless lawsuits, breaches of contract, libels, false advertising, interference in our customer relationships, and trademark infringement."
Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software, Inc. is the technology leader for real-time operating systems and software development tools for 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Our royalty-free INTEGRITY RTOS, velOSity microkernel, compilers, MULTI and AdaMULTI Integrated Development Environments and TimeMachine debugger offer a complete development solution that addresses both deeply embedded and high-reliability applications. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. For more information, see www.ghs.com.
