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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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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 ;)