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eCos 2.0 Breaks Out of Red Hat Red Tape


POSIX layer offers lightweight alternative to embedded Linux

By Edward J. Correia
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April 15, 2003 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Free of the shackles imposed by Red Hat Inc., maintainers of the open-source eCos real-time operating system said in mid-March that version 2.0, now in beta, could be generally available around April 15. The new version will add an all-new bootloader with remote debugging and full POSIX compliance, giving it the ability to run many Linux and Unix applications with just a recompile.

"This was the best possible move for the future of eCos: to get out from under Red Hat and become truly open and not controlled by a commercial company with commercial interests," said former Red Hat employee Alex Schuilenburg, now CEO of eCosCentric Ltd., the company he formed with three other of the six original eCos developers.

Schuilenburg credited significant increases in target support of eCos 2.0 to that freedom. "[Under Red Hat,] any kind of public release had to be customer-driven. Now that we're no longer part of Red Hat, we have a lot more freedom to do things." One of those things, he said, is to port eCos to many new development platforms and boards. "We plan to conquer the world by making eCos as pervasive as possible." General release should come within the month, he said.

The new version will support nearly a dozen processor architectures, including ARM, MIPS, Motorola 68K/ColdFire, PowerPC and x86. Schuilenburg cited survey data published by CMP Media LLC that showed eCos with a 5 percent estimated market share for 2003, up from 3 percent in 2002, and that it is being considered by about 1 in 5 embedded developers.

Peter Vandenabeele, CEO of Mind NV (www.mind.be), which develops and markets tools and services surrounding eCos and embedded Linux, said that being dropped by Red Hat also means freedom from its restrictive license. "The Red Hat license forced anyone using a modified version of eCos, even in private circles, to send modifications back to Red Hat."

Since last year, eCos, like Linux, has been licensed under the GPL, but with one important exception, according to Vandenabeele. "Unlike regular GPL, in eCos you are not forced to release other programs that you distribute with eCos if they are linked with eCos. In GPL, if you link a proprietary program to a GPL library and want to release it, you can only do that if you also release the program." On the other hand, Vandenabeele added that programs that include parts of eCos or changes to eCos itself are required also to be released under GPL.



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