Red Hat will give eCos Copyrights to the FSF!

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Red Hat will give eCos Copyrights to the FSF!

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 13, 2004 @05:59AM from the very-cool-gesture dept.

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."

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Stopped developing it in 2002? by Saeed+al-Sahaf · 2004-01-13 06:02 · Score: 4, Informative

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
1. Re:Stopped developing it in 2002? by jifl · 2004-01-13 06:50 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  >The web site indecates new development as recent as
  >September of last year.
  
  Um, development has been ongoing, irrespective of Red Hat's loss of interest back at the start of 2002. There just hasn't been any big news since then. See the patch list for example.
  The eCos maintainers (of which I'm one) have been pushing for a solution to the copyright issue for quite some time. It's good for everyone that Red Hat have donated eCos to the FSF.
Re:tax writeoff by greenhide · 2004-01-13 06:05 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Dreamcast Linux by Erwos · 2004-01-13 06:12 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Where has eCos been used? by ams001 · 2004-01-13 06:15 · Score: 5, Informative

There are loads of commercial products and projects using eCos. See http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecos/examples.shtml
Re:Abandonware by TwistedSquare · 2004-01-13 06:23 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:If development stopped in 2002... by mcspock · 2004-01-13 06:24 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:This is strange. by The+Lord+of+Chaos · 2004-01-13 06:26 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:Wonderful news! by OrangeTide · 2004-01-13 06:28 · Score: 4, Informative

Not really big news. eCos was GPL since March of 2002. The difference is that Redhat is giving the copyright over to FSF to watch over. Prior to March 2002 eCos was under the Red Hat eCos Public License. If you go back even further eCos was first released in October 1998 by Cygnus Solutions. And [as far as I know] was property of Cygnus Solutions until November 1999, which was when Red Hat aquired them.

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...

1.1 Where It All Started--Cygnus Solutions

Michael Tiemann, David Henkel-Wallace, and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. The idea behind Cygnus Solutions was to provide high-quality support and development for open source software. It was initially unclear whether this business model would work out; however, by the end of the first year it was obvious from the value of the support and development contracts that the business was real. The workload was enormous for the five-person company (the three founders, a salesperson, and a part-time graduate student).

It was clear that the engineering support model worked; however, the costs to fulfill these contracts were very high. In order to generate income at a lower cost, the engineers had to put their heads together to come up with an idea. The plan was to focus their development efforts on a small set of open-source technology that could be sold. The key to maintaining this development on an order that could be handled by the group was to keep the focus very small. What they came up with was selling the GNU compiler (GCC) and debugger (GDB) as shrink-wrapped software. This was the right team of people to do the job. Michael Tiemann, who contributed numerous GNU compiler ports and also wrote the first native C++ compiler (GNU C++ or G++), took on the task of working on GCC; David Henkel-Wallace worked on the binary utilities (binutils) and the library; and John Gilmore worked on GDB.

This task grew to monumental proportions. One advantage, or so it seemed, was that John Gilmore decided to become the new GDB maintainer. Making this known to the Internet community immediately flooded him with different versions of GDB. Now came the task of integrating these new version features.

Eventually, the hard work paid off in what today is called the GNUPro Developers Kit. The kit includes:

Read the rest of the chapter yourself.

--
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Re:Depends by jifl · 2004-01-13 07:13 · Score: 4, Informative

[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.