Red Hat will give eCos Copyrights to the FSF! 197
An anonymous reader notes "Businesswire reports in this article that RedHat will assign its copyrights for the eCos embedded OS to the FSF. This is great news, considering that they have stopped developing it in 2002. Hopefully this will mean new life for the project."
Depends (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that kind of depends on whether anyone cares or not. Most people who might have used eCos for the commercial support aspect, are using the high powered and rock-solid QNX OS. And those who wanted free embedded OSes for home projects are already using Embedded Linux or *BSD. Even more difficult for eCos is that embedded Linux and *BSD distros are usually custom to the application. Why would anyone want the overhead of a prepackaged solution?
Perhaps eCos has its uses, but it's a very small niche.
Good news (Score:2, Insightful)
It's good to see a company with its head screwed on straight, who can acknowledge when its time to move on from old wares and just let them go, instead of clinging to everything it's ever had its hands in, even when it's obviously pointless to do so.
Re:Go Red Hat! (Score:1, Insightful)
It might be fair and honest on paper to dump their desktop clients in favor of enterprise clients, but I will never forget or forgive them for that decision.
What has really changed? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with QNX (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe hacking eCos will give us the first "high powered, rock-solid and truly Free" embedded OS.
In my experience... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mixed Feelings about news like this (Score:1, Insightful)
Taking exception with the management for continued funding for the project when they saw it wasn't going to make any money is one thing; but taking exception for throwing away the "value" in the copyright of the commercially unsusccesful project is another.
Sure, you can use 20/20 hindsight and lambast them for funding it in the first place. And anyone familiar with R&D in a large organization will jump all over you.
But being peeved because they are donating something of zero value to them just shows you need to relax your sphincter.
Re:tax writeoff (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:QNX IS ON TEH SPOKE!!~1`` (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:This is strange. (Score:3, Insightful)
My reading of this is that it means that Red Hat is not interested in spending money defending the eCos copyright, if it should be violated. Only the copyright holder can pursue a claim when a copyright is violated. FSF has a history of doing this for GNU products they hold copyright to -- going back to the '80s when they nicely informed Steve Jobs that he had to follow the GPL for NeXT's gcc derivative.
(One of the lies people like to tell about the GPL is that "it's unproven because it's never been tested in court". Fact is, it's never had to be tested in court -- violators have always backed down before they had to be sued. NeXT was violating the GPL by distributing an extended gcc -- with Objective-C support -- without source. Once FSF confronted them, they released the source. The descendant of that gcc is still used in Mac OS X.)
Re:Mixed Feelings about news like this (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, the commercial prospects around it will always be running madly on top of a rolling ball of snow (to continue with and strain the analogy). Some might manage to remain on top for a bit, but eventually they will bet rolled over and become part of the main bulk, rolling down the hill.
In the end, a huge amount of general purpose software will be subsumed by the bulk of our rolling ball, and all will benefit from it. But to build a business (that isn't consulting based) on it seems worse than building on a house on a bed of sand... it's building a house on a rolling snowball (OK, now I just *snapped* the analogy in pieces).
Re:Depends (Score:3, Insightful)
eCos on these Super fast processors can now deliver more than the same processor using a larger/slower OS.
make a pocket video playback unit with eCos that is only slow and choppy with the larger players.
just because you have more processing power does not mean it's smart to use it up with a larger platform that you won't use the added functionality.
Re:Open source is cheaper, even if you pay (Score:3, Insightful)
It's probably cheaper to port your apps to Linux than to pay someone to enhance eCos. Plus, Linux has had this stuff for a while; it's tested, it's known to be stable. Any new implimentation might have inefficiencies, which adds more worries.
I'm talking out of my ass, since I don't know eCos or any RTOS, but I'm guessing that it's a simple matter of economics.
Re:Serious question here about end-of-life support (Score:3, Insightful)
Alternatively, they can use Linux, BSD, or similar, and get something which is actively supported.
Ultimately, the user is responsible for being educated. There's no reason Microsoft (or anyone else) should have to support something in perpetuity. The savvy users who would have something to gain from Windows 98 being open sourced have at least as much right to benefit as the clueless ones who would have something to lose have the right to benefit from it remaining closed. HOWEVER, there are two reasons why it still makes more sense to be on the side of the open-sourcers. One, security through obscurity is no security. This is a truism. Two, the code (most of it anyway) belongs to Microsoft. If you don't want to be boned by Microsoft, don't do business with them. Your average computer user's needs (Office, web browsing, media playing, and solitaire-playing) are met more than adequately by Free/free operating systems and applications, which tend to be supported long past their apparent usefulness. However, especially as Windows 98's long sunset shows, Microsoft is very good about supporting operating systems long past the time when they should have been put to their death by any means necessary.