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Re: Red Hat’s eCos: Going, Going, Gone
- From: Alex Schuilenburg <alexs at ecoscentric dot com>
- To: Jonathan Larmour <jifl at jifvik dot org>
- Cc: ecorreia at bzmedia dot com, ecos-maintainers at ecos dot sourceware dot org,Gary Thomas <gary at mlbassoc dot com>, DCN <dcn at ecoscentric dot com>
- Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 12:53:12 +0000
- Subject: Re: Red Hat’s eCos: Going, Going, Gone
- Organization: eCosCentric Limited
- References: <402E9034.2030201@ecoscentric.com> <402EA74F.5040003@jifvik.org>
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