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Re: Red Hat’s eCos: Going, Going, Gone
- From: Jonathan Larmour <jifl at jifvik dot org>
- To: Alex Schuilenburg <alexs at ecoscentric dot com>
- 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: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 22:55:11 +0000
- Subject: Re: Red Hat’s eCos: Going, Going, Gone
- References: <402E9034.2030201@ecoscentric.com>
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