Re: NAND & YAFFS

[Andrew Lunn <andrew dot lunn at ascom dot ch>]

Hi Folks

As an eCos maintainer i've been taking a back seat recently, pursuing
other interest etc. However i'm probably the most independent
maintainer since i've never worked for eCosCentric. 

[...]

> I dutifully followed eCos' outlined procedures to avoid double work,
> and did RFCs and notification of early release (including the
> statement that it is complete on my BlackFin hardware, and that it
> had survived some long YAFFS tests).  Sure, I picked up the comments
> made by Andrew Lunn.

I fully agree with you here. You did all the right things. 

I wish i could of helped some more, but i have no real knowledge of
NAND, don't have any hardware which uses it and no real personal need
for it. I did consider writing a synth NAND emulator, as a way to get
into the subject more, but there is no really itch i needed to
scratch. 

Anyway, this is getting away from the point of the email...

> Allow me to confess that I am disappointed that the work I put into NAND  
> flash for eCos has not been considered by eCosPro. 

[...]
>
> Another reason that I think eCosPro has not chosen the wisest course  
> here is the shadow it throws into the future. Isn't it an unattractive  
> proposition for anyone who would want to contribute that they will only  
> afterwards be informed that their work may be out-competed by eCosPro  
> themselves?

This is also not the first time this has happened. A recent example
would be the Cortex-M3 work. If i dug into the email archives i could
find other examples. There is a possibility of it happening again soon
as well. eCosCentric have a more modern lwIP port in there tree than
the current in anoncvs. I understand they have optimized it for small
platform and made it more stable. There is the current effort going on
to update the anoncvs lwip code. When this reaches maturity, which
looks like will happen soon, are eCosCentric going to pull out there
trump card again and contribute there lwip port? 

In most of these cases there has been early communication from the
community. eCosCentric don't take part in such communications, which
is find disappointing. In fact the only module i can think of which
had open discussion between an open community development and
eCosCentric payed for by contract was the flash_v2 code.

They are a commercial organization, so do have some restrictions.
Fixed delivery dates, NDAs with customers, the desire to sell
something a couple of times to recoup their costs etc.  They also need
to defend against the case that somebody says they are going to
develop feature X, which eCosCentric already have, in a hope that
eCosCentric will make there version available for free. It seems to me
eCosCentric waits for the open version of feature X to reached beta
quality, is clearly going to be useable, but is incompatible to there
implementation. They then make there own available to easy there own
integration problems. By this time, whoever has implemented the open
version has spent a few man months and is not happy about there wasted
effort and maybe then being forced to port there device drivers etc to
eCosCentric infrastructure, so causing them more effort.

How can things be better? I would say eCosCentric needs to find a way
to be more open about what they are doing. Was this level of secrecy
needed for a NAND infrastructure? What has been gained by eCosCentrics
customer by keeping it secret? Why could eCosCentric, when it got the
contract, not jump into the discussion, suggest changes to the
proposed API and get it frozen. Maybe offered to take over development
of the core and ask Rutger to work on drivers for his specific devices
using the frozen API? If this could not be done out in the open would
it not of been possible to setup an NDA with Rutger and do it behind
closed doors until it was ready for release?

eCosCentric is also not benefiting from the community. They have lost
3 man months of effort from Rutger which could of been used for nearly
free to fulfil there customer contract! Once they released there
Cortex-M3 port a few bugs where quickly found which with a more open
development process would of been found earlier. There own products
could be made better from more interaction with the community.

How do we go forward with the NAND work? First impressions is that the
two implementations are roughly equal. So we need an open review of
both. Since eCosCentric are offering to contribute theres, please post
it to ecos-patches along side Rutgers, so all interested parties can
take part in the review.

     Andrew