I am glad you like bugzilla, I do too. Unfortunately that is not what Red Hat use for their official paid-for support mechanism. They use some crappy proprietary software which spews out a URL that is supposed to give you an easy in to see state changes/etc, only the URL is only accessible if you are on the Red Hat VPN. i.e. it is useless to the paying customers.
Rather than making this link available to customers, or removing it and adding the state and comment to the email, Red Hat's official comment on this that they are too busy to fix this. And this is the official support mechanism for paying customers.
Whomever is responsible for support at Red Hat needs a big kick up the rear, because it really sucks.
and anyone who says differently obviously has not tried using their support much. Red Hat readily admit to their customers (our company being one) that they do not have enough developers to provide support. I quote from one of our oustanding support requests:
I have talked to our developers and Product Management the last days and unfortunately we currently couldn't allocate enough developer ressources to get this issue fixed.
I will try to check when the currently estimated time for this fix is. -- Response of 18 Jan to support query filed 4 Aug 2005, still no engineer assigned...
On average we get a 6 month delay before the report reaches an engineer, and when it does the first thing we get asked is if the problem is still occurring (read fixed this yourselves yet?). Don't get me wrong. I love Red Hat and the work it does. We took on RHEL V4 instead of FC for the core services of our company, primarily for the support aspect. Out of the several support requests filed we only have had prompt decent support for one of them - and that was only because their web support had gone down and they were taking phone support. It really makes me wonder what the benefit of RHEL is over FC if support is near non-existant. Or is some big corporate with RHEL rolled out across all its servers consuming all of Red Hat's support staff, denying the small fries any look in to support?
Hmmm, by that token any highly specialised RTOS written and used by a single person for a highly successful product could be considered the most popular in the world.
Surely you would measure the most popular RTOS by the number of developers or projects using the RTOS?
eCos has a uITRON compatabile API as well as a POSIX and native API, so I guess as a superset of ITRON it must be the most popular RTOS.
Consider this for a moment. QNX started in the extremely small embedded market (e.g. dishwashers, car computers, microwaves, etc.) and has built up to its current size and ability due to customer demand. If that's what customers are demanding, is it really too big?
If eCos is targetting the extremely small embedded market and has a bigger market share than QNX, do you still think QNX made the right choice in going bigger? Fact is, when companies are producing millions of units and they can save $1 by using less memory, they will. I have seen companies spend six figure sums to modify their software to use less memory and cheaper parts so they can shave a few dollars off the cost of the unit. If they produce a couple of million units, that is a couple of million saved.
So unless the price difference between memory sizes and CPUs becomes insignificant or reverses, there will always be a demand for smaller RTOSes.
eCos is also royalty and license fee free, so there is another couple of dollars saved per unit right there.
To be fair, I believe Red Hat did the right thing in donating the copyright to the FSF. It is good for the project and hey, Red Hat and the FSF even generate some positive PR out of it.
I am not surprised that Red Hat and the FSF made this announcement as if it was their idea, since it was their agreement that eventually made this possible, but it was the eCos maintainers and community that wanted this to happen. The maintainers first negotiated with the FSF to accept public assignments of eCos after considering various alternatives, along with several requests to Red Hat to contribute the copyright to a not-for-profit organisation. You can read the start of the negotiations in the eCos maintainers mailing list here
In reality the eCos project was never discontinued as many incorrect postings suggest. The original developers formed eCosCentric to continue providing commercial support and the community using and supporting eCos continued to grow. The public version was also moved away to a sourceware address as Red Hat which was concentrating on Linux and the Linux Enterprise and moving away from the embedded space. (Red Hat still host the sourceware site which is also home for many other FSF and open source projects -gcc, gdb, gcj, etc - mostly from the Cygnus era.)
Red Hat effectively gave up control of eCos when it laid off the eCos group as the original developers and maintainers continued to work on eCos in the public version. With only 1 internal maintainer left to support existing customers, the public version of eCos soon surpassed the version held entirely by Red Hat. Rather than fork the code base or split copyright/ownership between Red Hat and the maintainers and to protect eCos against the SCO's of this world, the eCos mainatainers and community decided to push for Red Hat to assign ownership of eCos to the FSF. So the right thing for eCos finally happened IMNSHO:-)
My guess is you are a staunch QNX user and you know very little outside the QNX marketplace. eCos is the fastest growing RTOS (used in projects) and is being used in far more projects than QNX. Don't believe me, read the latest market surveys (unfortunatley, not public as the reports cost $4000 a shot).
As for rock solid commercial support, eCosCentric was founded by the original developers of eCos after being laid off by Red Hat and continues to be developed and supported both by the community and the mainatiners with eCosCentric continuing to provide commercial versions.
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I am glad you like bugzilla, I do too. Unfortunately that is not what Red Hat use for their official paid-for support mechanism. They use some crappy proprietary software which spews out a URL that is supposed to give you an easy in to see state changes/etc, only the URL is only accessible if you are on the Red Hat VPN. i.e. it is useless to the paying customers.
Rather than making this link available to customers, or removing it and adding the state and comment to the email, Red Hat's official comment on this that they are too busy to fix this. And this is the official support mechanism for paying customers.
Whomever is responsible for support at Red Hat needs a big kick up the rear, because it really sucks.
I have talked to our developers and Product Management the last days and unfortunately we currently couldn't allocate enough developer ressources to get this issue fixed.
I will try to check when the currently estimated time for this fix is. -- Response of 18 Jan to support query filed 4 Aug 2005, still no engineer assigned...
On average we get a 6 month delay before the report reaches an engineer, and when it does the first thing we get asked is if the problem is still occurring (read fixed this yourselves yet?). Don't get me wrong. I love Red Hat and the work it does. We took on RHEL V4 instead of FC for the core services of our company, primarily for the support aspect. Out of the several support requests filed we only have had prompt decent support for one of them - and that was only because their web support had gone down and they were taking phone support. It really makes me wonder what the benefit of RHEL is over FC if support is near non-existant. Or is some big corporate with RHEL rolled out across all its servers consuming all of Red Hat's support staff, denying the small fries any look in to support?
No wonder Oracle are looking to move in
Surely you would measure the most popular RTOS by the number of developers or projects using the RTOS?
eCos has a uITRON compatabile API as well as a POSIX and native API, so I guess as a superset of ITRON it must be the most popular RTOS.
If eCos is targetting the extremely small embedded market and has a bigger market share than QNX, do you still think QNX made the right choice in going bigger? Fact is, when companies are producing millions of units and they can save $1 by using less memory, they will. I have seen companies spend six figure sums to modify their software to use less memory and cheaper parts so they can shave a few dollars off the cost of the unit. If they produce a couple of million units, that is a couple of million saved.
So unless the price difference between memory sizes and CPUs becomes insignificant or reverses, there will always be a demand for smaller RTOSes.
eCos is also royalty and license fee free, so there is another couple of dollars saved per unit right there.
I am not surprised that Red Hat and the FSF made this announcement as if it was their idea, since it was their agreement that eventually made this possible, but it was the eCos maintainers and community that wanted this to happen. The maintainers first negotiated with the FSF to accept public assignments of eCos after considering various alternatives, along with several requests to Red Hat to contribute the copyright to a not-for-profit organisation. You can read the start of the negotiations in the eCos maintainers mailing list here
In reality the eCos project was never discontinued as many incorrect postings suggest. The original developers formed eCosCentric to continue providing commercial support and the community using and supporting eCos continued to grow. The public version was also moved away to a sourceware address as Red Hat which was concentrating on Linux and the Linux Enterprise and moving away from the embedded space. (Red Hat still host the sourceware site which is also home for many other FSF and open source projects -gcc, gdb, gcj, etc - mostly from the Cygnus era.)
Red Hat effectively gave up control of eCos when it laid off the eCos group as the original developers and maintainers continued to work on eCos in the public version. With only 1 internal maintainer left to support existing customers, the public version of eCos soon surpassed the version held entirely by Red Hat. Rather than fork the code base or split copyright/ownership between Red Hat and the maintainers and to protect eCos against the SCO's of this world, the eCos mainatainers and community decided to push for Red Hat to assign ownership of eCos to the FSF. So the right thing for eCos finally happened IMNSHO :-)
My guess is you are a staunch QNX user and you know very little outside the QNX marketplace. eCos is the fastest growing RTOS (used in projects) and is being used in far more projects than QNX. Don't believe me, read the latest market surveys (unfortunatley, not public as the reports cost $4000 a shot). As for rock solid commercial support, eCosCentric was founded by the original developers of eCos after being laid off by Red Hat and continues to be developed and supported both by the community and the mainatiners with eCosCentric continuing to provide commercial versions.
There are loads of commercial products and projects using eCos. See http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecos/examples.shtml