eCos Timeline



		A Concise History of eCos From the projects inception in 1997 eCos has developed into widely ported, feature rich, reliable, and mature RTOS. eCos's development has been a driven by a combination of commercial interests from companies such as Cygnus, Red Hat and eCosCentric, and by eCos's vibrant open source community contributing bug fixes, ports, and new features. 1997 eCos was conceived and initially developed by Cygnus Solutions Inc., who initiated the project in February 1997. Cygnus was at that time the leading commercial provider of the GNU compiler toolchain to the embedded market, and saw an opportunity to develop an open source based runtime partner to its open source tools. 1998 The inaugural eCos 1.0 release was shipped in September 1998. Launch functionality included the HAL, kernel, ISO C library, and uITRON compatibility layer. Ports were provided to the MIPS, MN10300, and PowerPC architectures. Subsequent releases have continued to extend and refine the RTOS core functionality, extend the feature set, and add further board and processor ports. 1999 The EL/IX API initiative is launched in September with the aim of providing a standardized common API between eCos and Linux. This will evolve into eCos's Posix compatibility layer. Cygnus's merger with Red Hat is announced in November 1999. 2000 The eCos based RedBoot bootloader and debug agent is announced and released in May. 2002 eCos 2.0 alpha is released in May under a new modified GPL open source license. Red Hat subsequently went through various reorganizations and refocused on enterprise Linux as its primary market. In April 2002 eCosCentric was created as a spin-off from Red Hat, and employed the main eCos management and development team when development at Red Hat halted in June 2002. eCosCentric's mission is to focus on providing commercial eCos development services and product lines. The CMP Embedded Brand Study 2002 indicates a market share of 3% for eCos. 2003 eCos 2.0 beta is released in March, followed by the 2.0 final in May. eCosCentric's eCosPro line of commercially supported enhanced eCos distributions debuted in September 2003. 2004 In January 2004 Red Hat agrees in principle to transfer its eCos copyrights and trademarks to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). 2005 The 2005 real-time operating systems survey from CMP's Embedded Systems Programming magazine placed eCos in the top ten RTOSs by market share, with over 4% of the respondents using eCos. 2006 The Linux Devices 2006 embedded survey shows a 5% market share for eCos. The later CMP 2006 embedded survey shows sustained growth for eCos over the previous survey, with use increasing to 6% of surveyed developers. 2007 The eCos trademark was acquired by eCosCentric when it became available in February 2007. CMP's Embedded Study 2007, and EDC's Embedded Development Survey 2007 both peg eCos market share at 5-6%. 2008 The Red Hat copyright transfer along with assignments from eCosCentric and all the eCos maintainers are finally complete, resulting in the unification all of eCos's copyrights under the FSF by May of 2008.

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A Concise History of eCos