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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."

2 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I think this is a good move for redhat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi.

    I work with embedded OS and hardware, so I can tell from your niave statments that you don't.

    Size, power consumption, etc dictate components, and upgrading from 100k to 2 meg of memory just isn't possible most of the time. Since linux is a memory hog (compared to other embedded OSes), and has poor latency, it's not a viable option.

    Since the minix license has changed, that's one of the most popular "free" OSes available. And it doesn't have the legal entaglements linux has.

    I like linux - we use it for our web, mail, and samba servers. But we don't use it for embedded devices.

  2. 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.