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."
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.
There are loads of commercial products and projects using eCos. See http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecos/examples.shtml
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.
>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.