eCosCentric congratulates Red Hat on assignment of eCos copyrights to FSF

CAMBRIDGE, UK -- January 14, 2004 -- eCosCentric warmly congratulates Red Hat on their stated intent to assign the copyrights they hold in the eCos code base to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Paul Beskeen, Chairman of eCosCentric, commented "We view this as a positive move that will benefit the entire eCos developer community".

eCosCentric will, as promised, also assign all the eCos public licensed code that it retains copyright in to the FSF. This includes both eCosCentric contributed code and assignments to eCosCentric from the eCos community. This will ensure that a single copyright owner exists for the entire eCos source base, simplifying and enhancing the legal protection of the open source license and intellectual property held in eCos. It will also aid in the rapid turn-around of assignments for new contributions and incorporation of the code into the public eCos source base. The FSF copyright ownership of all current and future code greatly reduces the potential for SCO/Linux type copyright cases.

"I am delighted that Red Hat has listened to the community and their wish to consolidate the copyrights under the auspices of the FSF" commented Jonathan Larmour, Lead Maintainer and Chief Engineer at eCosCentric.

The decision by Red Hat to assign the code to the FSF is recognition of the fact that development and maintenance of eCos has, since Spring 2002, primarily taken place outside of Red Hat, driven by the developer community and eCos focused businesses such as eCosCentric. Consolidation of the legal ownership and vendor neutrality of eCos should help to further fuel the take-up of eCos and associated RedBoot firmware in the embedded marketplace. The 2002 Embedded Market Study, Final Report, November 2002, by CMP placed current eCos RTOS usage within the embedded market at 5%, with a further 19.8% of respondents considering the use of eCos within the next 12 months.

About eCosCentric
eCosCentric is the leading global provider of eCos based services and products. Founded by the core members of the original Red Hat eCos group, eCosCentric brings to bear many man years of experience and authoritative knowledge of the eCos RTOS. With a dedicated focus on eCos and related technology, services include consultancy, technical support, training, custom engineering, porting and certification. Products include the range of eCosPro^® Developers' Kits - complete commercial strength distributions of the eCos RTOS, including various run-time add-ons, RedBoot firmware, GNU tools and Eclipse based IDE for eCos application development.