eCos as an FSF project?

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at jifvik dot org>]

On behalf of the eCos maintainers, I would like to express our interest in 
possibly becoming an FSF project. As you may remember from 
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ecos-license.html>, eCos is GPL'd, albeit 
with a particular exception to make it more suitable for embedded use in a 
way that reflected the maintainers' aims at that time.

To give some background, eCos was originally developed within Cygnus 
Solutions, which was then purchased by Red Hat. At the start of 2002, we 
changed the licence from the old GPL-incompatible RHEPL to the present 
licence. Then a little later in 2002, Red Hat to all intents and purposes 
dropped eCos as a project, primarily by virtue of dropping all but one of 
the developers!

Since then eCos has continued development as a free project at 
http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/ (sources.redhat.com is not strictly a Red 
Hat corporate machine - it hosts other projects including, as you know 
binutils, gdb and gcc albeit with a different hostname), under the terms 
of the GPL.

However we have been reappraising the future of where ownership of new 
work should be vested. Right now, most of the code is, of course, still 
copyrighted by Red Hat. For many contributions, we have continued to 
include a copyright assignment to Red Hat as a condition of contribution, 
at least for the time being. However for work by the maintainers 
themselves[1] - a substantial amount of work since early 2002 - we have 
retained copyright ourselves personally with a view to assigning this to 
whatever entity we decide down the road should hold all future copyright, 
whether it be the FSF or whoever. This was done so as to limit the power 
of a single commercial company with no real future interest in eCos to 
still control every bit of the intellectual property.

We have had discussions with Red Hat, and have now reached the conclusion 
that Red Hat has no intention of assigning their copyright to any other 
entity, and they are no longer replying to us on the subject so our 
discussions are considered to be at an end.

We had originally considered and discounted approaching the FSF earlier 
because we had in mind a particular goal for doing a form of opt-out 
licence. We have now dropped these plans and are happy for eCos to 
continue to be licensed to everyone equally under the eCos licence 
(GPL+exception).

But now we are interested whether the FSF would consider adopting eCos as 
a project. This is primarily because the FSF's goals are, naturally, well 
aligned with those of pretty much any GPL'd software project; but also 
because the alternative was either dropping copyright assignments 
completely or creating our own not-for-profit entity to hold copyright 
which is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult when only two of us are 
US residents. We haven't yet reached a final definite decision, whether 
for assigning to the FSF, dropping assignments completely or whatever 
route, but to do this we'd need to know what is involved, whether the FSF 
would be willing, and any consequences we should be made aware of.

So we would very much like to know if the FSF are prepared to adopt eCos, 
and any ramifications for us. One particular issue we want to be sure of 
is how much autonomy the eCos maintainers would get. Obviously we would 
like to remain fully autonomous, but I don't know whether the FSF may 
think differently!

One complication, which you probably guessed from the background, is that 
the end result would be that eCos would become copyright *both* Red Hat 
and the Free Software Foundation. While this isn't ideal and we wish it 
could be avoided, at least it is better, from a legal point of view, than 
dropping assignments and instead copyright being held by hundreds of 
people, like the Linux kernel. Would this double copyright cause any 
problems for the FSF?

Note the CC'd ecos-maintainers list is publically archived, so if you want 
to reply privately you can do so to me and I'll forward to everyone 
privately.

Thanks in advance!

Jifl

[1] John Dallaway, Nick Garnett, Andrew Lunn, Mark Salter, Gary Thomas, 
Bart Veer, and myself.
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