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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."
You mean like HURD?
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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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Is this the first time a software developer has expressly relinquished copyright for abandonware? Of course, eCos was never proprietary, so it's not quite the same...
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.
I wonder what license the FSF will put on the copyrights when they get them?
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
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 ;)
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.