Is the eCos Open Source development model at risk?

["Michael Checky" <Michael_Checky at Thermoking dot com>]

To the eCos maintainers,

I might be ignorant of how other Open Source development projects actually
work, but I thought the model was something similar to the following:

1. Because eCos is Open Source, anybody can use the code for their own
development projects.
2. To keep eCos moving forward, everybody who uses eCos in their
development projects are encouraged to "give back" to the eCos project.
Bug fixes, new features, new ports, upgraded documentation, etc. are all
candidates for "giving back".
3. The "eCos Maintainers", i.e., the people who have write access to the
eCos CVS repository, then filter these contributions to make sure the eCos
sources maintain their high quality.

Implicit in this model, is the requirement that the "eCos Maintainers"
acknowledge contributions from the rest of us.  Acknowledgement does not
mean that every contribution has to be added to the repository, after all
eCos quality has to be maintained.  But if someone takes the time and
effort to make what they consider a reasonable or even valuable
contribution, the "maintainers" need to at least make an effort at to
acknowledge the contribution, so that the contributors don't end up
thinking that their time and effort was totally wasted.

Acknowledgement can take many forms.  For example:
1. "Your contribution has merit, when I have the time, I'll consider it."
This implies that it wil be considered in the relatively near future.
2. "Sorry, your contribution does not meet the high quality of eCos, or
it's not well thought out enough, or it incomplete, or it conflicts with
something else.  Please reorganize it and resubmit it."

I know everybody's time is overallocated, but there's not exactly a flood
of user contributions.  And I maintain, without acknowledgement, users will
not continue to make contributions.  Furthermore, if there really is no
time to acknowledge contributions, then open up write access to the eCos
repository and let the users add their contributions directly (this is not
an option that I really like).

Obviously I felt the need to write this because I believe I have submitted
worthwhile contributions and they seem to have been ignored.  They are:

1. A rewrite of the Samsung S3C4510 ethernet driver.
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-devel/2003-05/msg00007.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-devel/2003-05/msg00009.html

2. A patch to fix a compile error
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-devel/2003-05/msg00010.html

3. A patch to fix a link error
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-patches/2003-06/msg00001.html

4. A patch to fix a compiler optimization error
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-patches/2003-04/msg00110.html

5. A patch to add functionality to serial.h
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-patches/2003-03/msg00171.html

Thanks for your time
Michael Checky