QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

None, I guess. It is just a Posix OS, with not the brightest future.

Bad product, bad company, bad marketing. Consistent.

If only you could believe them.

QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again.

Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for three years when working on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle.

All of that went away after the Harman acquisition of QNX in 2004.

Then, in 2007, QNX went open source. You could even look at the microkernel. It wasn't openly licensed, but you could look inside and build it.

In 2010, RIM acquired QNX, and, with no warning, closed the source. All open source development related to QNX ceased, and QNX lost all credibility in the community. So QNX shot itself in the foot. Twice.

Note the contractual terms.[1] "TERMINATION. This Agreement and licenses granted hereunder may be terminated by either Party upon written notice to the other Party". QNX can pull the plug at any time. Since they've done so twice in the past, there's a good chance that will happen again.

Now, if QNX is serious about this, the way to go is to use the licensing model Epic uses for Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is behind most AAA game titles. The basic terms are that you can download the source and use it for anything you want, and there's no charge until you get the first $1 million in revenue from your product. Then Epic takes a 5% royalty.[2] This has been extremely successful for Epic. There's not much of a piracy problem, because if your game gets enough revenue to matter, it has enough visibility that their licensing people will notice. Meanwhile, there's a large pool of people using Unreal Engine.

That's the way to do it if you want more adoption of QNX. Take the Epic term sheet to your lawyers and management. And have them take a look at Unreal Engine's revenue growth vs. QNX.

As I once told a QNX sales rep, your problem isn't that you're being pirated. It's that you're being ignored.

[1] http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=51624

[2] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/UnrealEngine/faq/UnrealEngineE...

Dealing with Linux can be a PITA. Once you get a base system up you still need to roll a bunch of our own stuff. Do you use System unit or systemd, etc. The driver api's are pretty unstable.

I make embedded linux device and I'm curious if QNX could make things easier, especially for long term stability.

We have a couple of students working on bringing up the hardware in the Pimoroni Trilobot kit on QNX, but adding some ML to the camera for some kind of autonomous steering perhaps. It will be the perfect blend of intensive processing (camera+ML) with hardware control (short high-priority interrupts). (P.S. hope to open-source this when they are done, along with some blog posts or tutorials -- stay tuned.)

Separately, I think making a GPS-synced weather station would be a fun project. QNX is often used when tight timing is needed for telemetry, so using it to collect weather (and other) data, including from pulsing hardware like an anemometer, and then publishing it to an online service would be a lot of fun.

If software-only is more your style, there may or may not be someone in the office next to me porting some classic games right now! =)