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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."

1 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. This is bad news for open source. by Ludwig668 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a long time RTOS programmer, and being a contributor to the ECOS project, I think that this is a terrible blow for the open source community. Is open source (and LGPL) viable? This decision suggests not.

    The best thing about open source is that you don't have to rely on an inept customer service person to figure out that they in fact have problems in their system. I've spent weeks asking a large closed source and very expensive RTOS vendor to fix some of the dumbest OS bugs (admittedly in a new JVM product they'd hardly released yet)--they still don't believe the one page test programs I send them; in fact, I've just been simply astounded at the dumb things I've been told to do. There's nothing worse than knowing that if you had the source, you'd just simply fix the problem, submit the change, and move on. And you know what's worst? The development tools for this expensive RTOS were cygnus anyway.

    The eCos source code was very well written, it's confiuration understandable (and scriptable!), and all in all, a very well concieved project. I will do a CVS update now; and hang on tight to that system... it will be well worth it.