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Red Hat Dissolves eCos Team, Changes Embedded Strategy

Posted by chrisd on from the red-hat-goes-well-with-orange-socks dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "This article at LinuxDevices.com, which includes an Interview with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann, probes Red Hat's dissolution of its eCos project team and the reasoning behind Red Hat's newly adjusted embedded linux strategy. Tiemann says his company is still in the embedded business, but considers embedded to be an aspect of a broader 'platform OS' strategy."

4 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Embedded != real time by wiredog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've done work in industrial automation, and a real-time system is not necessarily embedded, no is an embedded system necessarily real time.

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  2. Re-inventing the wheel by wiredog · · Score: 3, Insightful
    If something more is required (some sort of a UI), build from the ground up tailoring the whole OS to your hardware

    Why should I spend weeks to months writing disk drivers, gui's, keyboard interfaces, etc, when there are OS's that have already done that?

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  3. Is it really bad? Remember Eazel? by qweqwe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad news. It may even be good news.

    When Eazel died, Nautilus development didn't die. Instead, it expanded and resulted in a really nice, more focused and componentized part of GNOME. Why? Becuse Nautilus now grows in the direction the community wants, not in the direction that the Eazel wanted, so business model-related features/bloat and GNOME-duplicated functionality were stripped away.

    If you feel strongly about eCos, set up a CVS on sourceforge or savannah.gnu.org and see if anyone on the Debian mailing list is interesting in porting Debian to eCos (like they do for HURD, FreeBSD, Linux, and Win32 (although this port is *really* basic)). Or submit an "Ask Slashdot" call for developers and see who is interested. Either way, the source gives you a lot of power to control your OS choice.

  4. Re:I think this is a good move for redhat by MadShark · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You obviously don't work in the embedded field. For many embedded fields, minimizing unit cost is the utmost priority. A few cents(or several dollars in the case of moving from a 1 megabit to a 32 megabit flash) of difference makes a huge difference when you are talking hundreds of thousands or even millions of units. Spending the money on non-recuring engineering expenses pays off in the long run.

    And many embedded systems don't even have much of what most people consider an OS. They can get away with a very simple timed loop type OS or a simple scheduler. For the majority of embedded systems, Linux, and any other real time operating systems is just plain overkill.