The settlement sees the resumption of a 99-year agreement for Alameda, California-based Wind River to supply Santa Barbara, California-based Green Hills with its VxWorks real time operating system.
The long-term deal was agreed in 1992 and 1993, when Green Hills was strictly a development tools vendor and Wind River strictly a real time operating system vendor, and provided an important agreement to integrate the two technologies.
Since then things have changed, with both companies encroaching on each other’s turf, most obviously in 1996 when Green Hills introduced its Integrity real time operating system and Wind River its Tornado development tools.
The legal dispute began in 2004 when Wind River began withholding updates to the Tornado/VxWorks package, arguing that it was not covered by the agreement. Wind River sued Green Hills in June 2004 arguing that since becoming its direct competitor Green Hills had breached the contract by failing to develop its Multi tools for VxWorks and making disparaging comments about the Wind River products.
Green Hills truck back with claims of exclusionary conduct including bundling, exclusionary licensing, trademark infringement, false advertising, and harming competition in the embedded systems market.
The two companies have managed to settle out of court, however, with Green Hills agreeing to drop its claims and providing a royalty free Multi license to the company in return for Wind River providing it with royalty free licenses to VxWorks and its successors and integrated technology for the remainder of the original contract.
Wind River has also agreed not to use the Multi-X brand that it had adopted for the debugger component of its integrated development environment. No money changed hands as part of the settlement.
