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


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?

Gary (CC'ed) remains to be an eCos maintainer (all eCos maintainers CC'ed) and still contributes to eCos. I am sure Gary will confirm everything above.

There are also further inaccuracies within your article.

Wearing my maintainer's hat and personal hat (i.e. not eCosCentric at all), I wish to add more:


- 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 heard nothing more from Red Hat, who are not replying to my mails on the subject, and no copyright transfer has taken place, nor do we know of any plans or schedule for it taking place. Most of the original eCos code is still copyright Red Hat (and code from 2002 is now 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 and development in February and made Gary Thomas redundant. Most other staff were not made redundant at the same time, although it had been anticipated. I was working in Red Hat on eCos and being paid by Red Hat until August 2002, and other eCos team members were similarly employed by Red Hat up till then as well, doing eCos work. Mark Salter, also an eCos team member, is still a Red Hat employee, and is an eCos maintainer.

Also, we were made redundant at that point, and were not fired. Perhaps UK employment law differs from the US in this respect, but in the UK an employee is generally "fired" for misconduct, negligence, etc. and thus saying I was fired is a very negative thing to say in the UK. I would recommend a clarification that we were not fired, but laid off/made redundant.

- 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.

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.

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.

Thanks,

Jifl
--
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine


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