Re: Red eCos: Going, Going, Gone

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>]

Alex Schuilenburg wrote:
> Andrew Lunn wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > I presume you are going to submit such a letter?
>
>
> Yes, just after I finish writing that other letter where another paper 
> quoted Gary Thomas as one of the three founding members (there were 9) 
> of eCosCentric, he left eCosCentric in 2002 because we were supposedly 
> in "financial difficulties" (a neat trick given we were not even trading 
> at that time), attributing the renaming name of eCos to Gary, and 
> describing arbitrary former eCos developers as "the original eCos team". 
>  Oh, and Gary still works for Mind - apparently :-)
>
> I won't point you to the article publically as I don't want to give the 
> article any creditability in this public archive.  Gary will probably 
> guess the paper as they obviously interviewed and misquoted him and will 
> probably contact him again once I send off that email to confirm my 
> corrections - in writing.

Well I'd like to go to the fallback option of correcting the SD times 
article on the ecos-discuss list, so that it _is_ on the record. If there's 
now another article with mistakes in (they will start breeding as one mag 
will use the misinformation in other articles as a source), then we can 
issue a correction for that at the same time which will look more 
even-handed too.

This would be from the maintainers not eCosCentric BTW :-). So anything 
eCosCentric-y wouldn't be covered in that correction. It's up to 
eCosCentric to do that if they want, although they (err... we (oh this is 
confusing)) could follow up to such an article themselves of course if they 
wish.

The corrections for the SDTimes article are:

 http://sdtimes.com/news/096/emb1.htm

- The article mistakenly claims that in 1998 Gary Thomas developed the 
Embedded Cygnus Operating System (eCos). In fact the idea of eCos started 
in 1996 and the original three developers of eCos were Paul Beskeen, Nick 
Garnett and Bart Veer. There were between 15 and 18 subsequent members of 
the eCos team employed, depending on what roles you include, before Gary 
Thomas was employed. The first release of eCos was in December 1997, the 
first public release being in November 1998. The name of eCos was decided 
upon by the Cygnus Solutions marketing department in 1998.

- Red Hat have not transferred ownership of eCos to the FSF. Red Hat have 
at this stage only issued a press release stating they intend to do so at 
some point in the future. The eCos maintainers have not yet heard more from 
Red Hat, and no copyright transfer has to our knowledge taken place, nor do 
we know of any plans or schedule for it taking place. The original pre-2002 
eCos code is still copyright Red Hat, and code from 2002 to present is 
partially copyright Red Hat and additionally copyrighted by eCos maintainers.

- eCos 1.3.1, the final official release from Red Hat, was released in 
March 2000, not 2001.

- Red Hat did ramp down eCos sales in February but the team were not laid 
off, even though that may have been expected. The majority of the eCos team 
continued to be employed by Red Hat until being laid off in May 2002 which 
can be confirmed in contemporary press reports. Some team members continued 
to work on eCos until August 2002. Mark Salter, also an eCos team member at 
that point, is still a Red Hat employee, and is an eCos maintainer. Note 
that none of the eCos team were fired; they were laid off.

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

- 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. 
This cannot be revoked under the terms of the GNU Public License.

This needs to be clarified as Mr.Tiemann's statement may imply 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.

Jifl
--
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