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

[Gary Thomas <gary at mlbassoc dot com>]

First of all, I want it to be known that I was not consulted in any way
about this article.  As has been mentioned many times, I was just a 
player in the creation of eCos, and was most certainly a late one at
that.

On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 05:53, Alex Schuilenburg wrote:
> 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.
> 

RedBoot grew out of internal needs and customer demands starting in late
1999.

Another major inaccuracy in the timeline [sidebar] from the article is
that eCosCentric was not formed until mid to late summer of 2002, well
after I had been laid off and the rest [the contingent in the UK] had
been provided notice of redundancy.

I, too, am appalled at the level of error in this article and fervently
appeal to the author and/or publisher to provide corrections to the
public.

-- 
Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com>
MLB Associates