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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."
Hopefully this will mean new life for the project.
I guess that kind of depends on whether anyone cares or not. Most people who might have used eCos for the commercial support aspect, are using the high powered and rock-solid QNX OS. And those who wanted free embedded OSes for home projects are already using Embedded Linux or *BSD. Even more difficult for eCos is that embedded Linux and *BSD distros are usually custom to the application. Why would anyone want the overhead of a prepackaged solution?
Perhaps eCos has its uses, but it's a very small niche.
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Indeed, this is great news. And this is one copyright I won't mind respecting :-)
It's good to see a company with its head screwed on straight, who can acknowledge when its time to move on from old wares and just let them go, instead of clinging to everything it's ever had its hands in, even when it's obviously pointless to do so.
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It might be fair and honest on paper to dump their desktop clients in favor of enterprise clients, but I will never forget or forgive them for that decision.
I'm not certain what effect if any this has on the development of the software. To correct several misinformed posts: As the article mentions Red Hat stopped development on the project in 2002. The community continued which is why you see new releases after then. Second, the software was already open source - the licence has not changed. What has changed is that they given copyright over to FSF. The reason for this is that it is easier from a legal standpoint for the copyright of a project to be held by a single entity who can defend the entire project rather than each little peice being copyright of the respective authors. Since Redhat was no longer actively developing eCos, it made since for them to turn over the copyright to someone else. But unless people were resistant to contribute because RedHat still maintained copyright, I don't see how this will give the project new life. What may help more is having the fact that the project has a new maintainer (and the front-page slashdot article won't hurt either ;)
Maybe hacking eCos will give us the first "high powered, rock-solid and truly Free" embedded OS.
...Red Hat has been a decent company. They usually make their stance clear and try to be honest at all times. That being said, their product distribution methodology could use some work. They have burned customers time and time again by distributing pre-release software that lacked polish. This would tend to result in oddities in their OSes such as USB mouse lockups, GNOME menus that lose their icons when installing user icons, kernel versions that are unsupported by hardware drivers such as NVidia (thank God NVidia found a way to fix that), and installations that randomly self-destruct. While I understand the pressures of the market place, a more stable codebase would inspire much more confidence in their customers.
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Taking exception with the management for continued funding for the project when they saw it wasn't going to make any money is one thing; but taking exception for throwing away the "value" in the copyright of the commercially unsusccesful project is another.
Sure, you can use 20/20 hindsight and lambast them for funding it in the first place. And anyone familiar with R&D in a large organization will jump all over you.
But being peeved because they are donating something of zero value to them just shows you need to relax your sphincter.
More than a "beginning of the year" coincidence, I would also consider RedHat's (fairly) recent move toward a very specific market (servers). It seems they're trying to possibly focus their efforts more, and along the way have a few "give-aways" that could be nothing but good publicity.
The moderation system actually discourages discussion and rewards one shot posts that leave little or no room for debate. Check out the shit that floats to the top and you'll see the trend.
My reading of this is that it means that Red Hat is not interested in spending money defending the eCos copyright, if it should be violated. Only the copyright holder can pursue a claim when a copyright is violated. FSF has a history of doing this for GNU products they hold copyright to -- going back to the '80s when they nicely informed Steve Jobs that he had to follow the GPL for NeXT's gcc derivative.
(One of the lies people like to tell about the GPL is that "it's unproven because it's never been tested in court". Fact is, it's never had to be tested in court -- violators have always backed down before they had to be sued. NeXT was violating the GPL by distributing an extended gcc -- with Objective-C support -- without source. Once FSF confronted them, they released the source. The descendant of that gcc is still used in Mac OS X.)
I can understand your mixed feelings. Personally, I use open source extensively and have released some minor contributions to those projects I use. I think in the long run, it is a slow moving ball of snow at the top of a very large mountain: it doesn't look like much sometimes, but it will continue to roll and gain size and speed.
That said, the commercial prospects around it will always be running madly on top of a rolling ball of snow (to continue with and strain the analogy). Some might manage to remain on top for a bit, but eventually they will bet rolled over and become part of the main bulk, rolling down the hill.
In the end, a huge amount of general purpose software will be subsumed by the bulk of our rolling ball, and all will benefit from it. But to build a business (that isn't consulting based) on it seems worse than building on a house on a bed of sand... it's building a house on a rolling snowball (OK, now I just *snapped* the analogy in pieces).
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What's more, being open source, it only takes one person or company to add them, or pay for them to be developed, and everyone can benefit and eCos moves forwards.
It's probably cheaper to port your apps to Linux than to pay someone to enhance eCos. Plus, Linux has had this stuff for a while; it's tested, it's known to be stable. Any new implimentation might have inefficiencies, which adds more worries.
I'm talking out of my ass, since I don't know eCos or any RTOS, but I'm guessing that it's a simple matter of economics.
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Alternatively, they can use Linux, BSD, or similar, and get something which is actively supported.
Ultimately, the user is responsible for being educated. There's no reason Microsoft (or anyone else) should have to support something in perpetuity. The savvy users who would have something to gain from Windows 98 being open sourced have at least as much right to benefit as the clueless ones who would have something to lose have the right to benefit from it remaining closed. HOWEVER, there are two reasons why it still makes more sense to be on the side of the open-sourcers. One, security through obscurity is no security. This is a truism. Two, the code (most of it anyway) belongs to Microsoft. If you don't want to be boned by Microsoft, don't do business with them. Your average computer user's needs (Office, web browsing, media playing, and solitaire-playing) are met more than adequately by Free/free operating systems and applications, which tend to be supported long past their apparent usefulness. However, especially as Windows 98's long sunset shows, Microsoft is very good about supporting operating systems long past the time when they should have been put to their death by any means necessary.
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