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Red Hat will give eCos Copyrights to the FSF!
An anonymous reader notes "Businesswire reports in this article that RedHat will assign its copyrights for the eCos embedded OS to the FSF. This is great news, considering that they have stopped developing it in 2002. Hopefully this will mean new life for the project."
The web site indecates new development as recent as September of last year.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Probably not, unless they can show lost profit due to this maneuver. I once tried to donate a few websites to some organizations. After I'd developed them, I found out that I can't deduct one dollar of their value. Not one. Basically, the only thing you can easily take a deduction for is hard goods or cash.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
The Linux-Dreamcast port apparently uses eCos to do some of the initial booting. So, while I wouldn't say I've seen it used practically, it was a nifty application of the OS.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
that the actual development was done prior to 2003 and only implemented in 2003. Just a guess, though, I could be wrong.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Code != Copyright
They've assigned the copyrights (not code) over to the FSF. The code has always been available from: http://ecos.sourceware.org/getstart.html
There are loads of commercial products and projects using eCos. See http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecos/examples.shtml
I remember reading (can't find mention on the site though) that Al Lowe, creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series, released the copyright on various old games (the ones owned by him rather than the publishers) for abandonware, since otherwise they would have died out... Confirmation would be good though.
Development by redhat stopped in 2002, when they did a round of layoffs. Basically the entire ecos dev group (which all came from the cygnus buyout) got dropped, and the majority of them went to form eCosCentric.
Redhat has continued to host the eCos project, just like they do for gcc and gdb, and the eCosCentric team has been writing updates as far as i know.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
This isn't abandonware in the traditional sense, where copyright is "relinquished" into the public domain. Rather, they are transferring the copyright to another organization, for them to retain copyright and re-license as they see fit. Assuming they GPL it, the code would be distributable and enforcable accordingly.
AFAIK eCos was always published under the GPL.
Assigning copyright to the FSF means that the FSF now owns the eCos codebase and they can do whatever they want with it including publishing it under the GPL.
Basically the point of this is so that if a developer wants to contribute to the eCos codebase they fill out a copyright assignment to the FSF instead of RedHat from now on.
My guess is you are a staunch QNX user and you know very little outside the QNX marketplace. eCos is the fastest growing RTOS (used in projects) and is being used in far more projects than QNX. Don't believe me, read the latest market surveys (unfortunatley, not public as the reports cost $4000 a shot). As for rock solid commercial support, eCosCentric was founded by the original developers of eCos after being laid off by Red Hat and continues to be developed and supported both by the community and the mainatiners with eCosCentric continuing to provide commercial versions.
If you are interested in developing with eCos the only book I know of is
Embedded Software Development with eCos
First chapter of the book...
Read the rest of the chapter yourself.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'd like to think my decision to buy Redhat shares (when it was $12.00 a share) Haha, I got in at something like $4/share. Either way though, you have to be happy with their earnings report in December. Also, I don't believe giving away copyright will significantly reduce the share price. Anyone with half a brain who's invested in Redhat knows the company gives away its work and makes it up on the support side. Oh wait, I said half a brain, that rules out 99% of investors.
eCos was once published under the eCos License, which was similar to the LGPL but not GPL-compatible. It is now published under the GPL with the exception of allowing proprietary applications / extensions (this is important in the embedded software market).
Saying this is like saying that you can deduct your hourly wage for the time you spend volenteering att he soup kitchen after work.
You can deduct goods, not time or services rendered. Not unless the donation of those services have a direct impact on your companies bottom line (ie, the donation nof thoe services meant lost time where you could have made profit from soemthing else ).
The main people working on eCos got laid off in Red Hat's small downsizing in 2002. The work you see is from the community and the company founded by the people that got laid off.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
[Uh oh! Advocacy war storm clouds gather]
I think you need to read up more on eCos! To call eCos "prepackaged" is about as far from the truth as you can get. The big C in eCos stands for configurable, and it is far more configurable and customizable to your application than any Linux or BSD will ever be, and certainly QNX.
eCos is for the deeply embedded market, and embedded Linux, even in 2.6 is so much bigger. eCos systems start from just a few KB (~10KB I think I remember), and scale up from there as you use more features - using configuration, just exactly the features you want, and with the semantics you want. You get the choice.
Add to that that eCos is completely open source, and royalty free with no upfront costs either (although you do have the option of commercial support if you do want it), and you'll understand why eCos is so popular.
eCos supports many more targets and architectures than QNX too.
I can tell you the PortalPlayer chip doesn't have an MMU, and thus the:
iPod (all of them, including mini)
Samsung Napster
Philips HD100
Rio Karma
don't have MMUs.
That's a large portion of the market, and the high-end to boot. Protected memory is generally not considered overly useful in consumer products since all it does is crash you when you do something wrong. The #2 thing you don't want to do on a consumer device is crash/hang.
Of these, none run Linux either, except for the Karma.
you did not do it right.
I was albe to write off 4 websites for non-profit groups.
1 - document hours spend working on it.
2 - Bill the group a real invoice for services rendered.
3 - get from them your form showing the donation amount.
Voila! tax writeoffs. a website is no different than donating IT time. Time spent as labor is time spent as labor, there are no provisions for it must be on specific items.
My CPA was who showed the correct proceedure to get things documented correctly to make it deductable.
I reccomend talking to one to find out if there is anything special for your state so the deduction will apply to both federal and state taxes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The slashdot summary is (*shock*) misleading. Officially Redhat stopped support and laid off the eCos developers, but the core developer as well as the at-large developers have been continuously developing eCos after Redhat backed out. In fact, I didn't start developing the AT91/EB40 port of eCos until after Redhat dropped it. Commits to CVS were slow since they had to be funnelled through the former Redhat developers which were fewer and number and looking for new sources of income, but development has been continuous.