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Re: Red Hat’s eCos: Going, Going, Gone


Jonathan Larmour wrote:

Alex Schuilenburg wrote:

Hi Eddie

I just read your article
http://sdtimes.com/news/096/emb1.htm
and was quite astounded by one of the facts you claim - "1998 – Gary Thomas develops the Embedded Cygnus Operating System (eCos)."


This is *totally* incorrect. The original architect of eCos was Nick Garnett who developed eCos in 1996, along with the original team of Bart Veer and Paul Beskeen. The first release of eCos was in 1997, at least a year before Gary Thomas joined Cygnus in 1998. Gary was approximately the 6th member to join the eCos team around the time Cygnus first released eCos publically.


From my recollection, at least Paul, Nick, Bart, Hugo, Stu G, Rob S, Chris Provenzano, Daniel Neades, John Dallaway, myself, Chris Tarpy, Jesper, Simon Fitzmaurice, Mark Galassi and arguably Gary O, Liz and Marc were members of the eCos team before Gary joined. That makes Gary between the 14th and 17th eCos team member. It's okay Alex, it was before your time too :-).

In that context, you can understand the surprise at such a statement. Perhaps there was some misunderstanding given Gary's much longer history and experience with PPC Linux as its main original developer?

Or RedBoot, since Gary did write that, although he wrote that while at Red Hat during 2000/2001 approx. Gary could give more exact times for the birth of RedBoot when he confirms the inaccuracies of the article.



[...]

- eCos 2.0 was released in May 2003, not September.

eCosPro 2.0 was released in September though. Maybe that is what was confused.




- In connection with Michael Tiemann's quote that the 17 month delay between its decision to cease eCos development and donate the code was due to "a careful effort to remove any parts that were inappropriate for open source. " I wish to clarify that no such previously unreleased code has been released by Red Hat since the eCos team's departure, and no code in eCos is being removed. All code released by the eCos team prior to the split with Red Hat was, is and remains open source under the eCos license.


I feel this must be clarified as Michael's statement implies that the code that people have been using since 2002 up to today has been in some sort of uncertain legal state, and some of it may be removed. This is untrue and such a perception could be damaging to the eCos project.

My statement regarding the delay are also inaccurate. We knew of potential buyers for eCos during 2002 but none during 2003 when the maintainers started looking for a NFP home for eCos. I certainly did not say nor imply the delay in the release of the code to the FSF was because Red Hat were looking for buyers.


Red Hat's contribution of eCos to the FSF is the next best solution that could have happened for eCos IMHO. The best solution would have been a NFP organisation which could sell eCos licenses and plough any profits back into the development of eCos through the funding of open eCos projects.



I hope that a correction with all the above items (and Alex's) will go some way to clearing up the inevitable confusion resulting from this article. I welcome any future articles on eCos, and happily offer my services to review a final draft by e-mail as factual inaccuracies obviously don't do anyone any favours. Feel free to mail me.

I will note also that after a long conversation with Eddie I did ask whether I would be able to read/comment/proof the article before it was to be published to ensure all the details and facts were correct. I was told then that this is not SD Times policy. Judging from the amount of inaccuracies and misquotes in this particular article, I would strongly suggest SD Times revise it's policy. I therefore would also welcome a correction of the article by SD Times.


-- Alex
Managing Director / CEO                           eCosCentric Limited
http://www.ecoscentric.com/              The eCos and RedBoot experts
Visit us at Embedded World, Nürnberg          17-19 Feb, Stand 12-449
and at Embedded Systems Conference, SFO,  30 Mar - 1 Apr, Booth #2527




Thanks,


Jifl




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