Red Hat has announced that it will assign all of its copyrights in the eCos open source operating system to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In conjunction with the eCos development community, Red Hat agreed that it would be best to have all eCos copyrights held by a single party.

Red Hat originally gained ownership of eCos when it acquired compiler and embedded operating system specialist Cygnus in November, 1999. It has negotiated with the FSF for some time about the transfer of eCos copyrights, during which eCosCentric served as interim maintainer. eCosCentric also plans to contribute its eCos copyrights to the FSF.

eCos is a very lightweight embedded operating system used in deeply embedded applications, where it needs fewer system resources than embedded Linux. It also forms the basis of the popular RedBoot bootloader. See this interview with Red Hat CTO, Michael Tiemann for more about the differences between eCos and embedded Linux.

Red Hat says its Global Engineering Services will continue to work with eCos and eCos-based solutions such as RedBoot.

“Red Hat continues to have great confidence in the Free Software Foundation as a trusted repository for free software code and projects,” said Mark Webbink, general counsel and senior vice president at Red Hat.

Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. “The Foundation is pleased to work with the eCos community for the protection and improvement of eCos and free software overall.”

 
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