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

blackberry.qnx.com

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

#61

Post by Animats »

nisten wrote: post #35
JohnAtQNX wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't hold me to timelines, but we're definitely headed in the direction of being more open and transparent. We're hearing that this is important to our customers and the community alike. Stay tuned!

The stock is almost dead. Please just opensource it instead of taking all that to the grave with you. Just do it.

I just looked. BB peaked around US$140 and is now around US$2. Financials are so bad it's amazing the doors are still open.[1]

QNX is a great technology, but nobody who acquired it knew what to do with it.

[1] https://www.bing.com/entitydetails?q=BB+stock&wt=FinanceGene...

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

#62

Post by Tomte »

Animats wrote: post #45

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 th…

For everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640

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

#65

Post by fulafel »

fauria wrote: post #60

In case you are wondering: QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system owned by BlackBerry, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. From https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx

The "unix-like" characterisation seems it might be be from the Wikipedia QNX article and repeated by a lot of web content. But it doesn't seem really accurate to me and it's not used by their own web site or documentation. It seems quite opposite to Unix in a lot of ways even though it has some API compatibility.

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

#66

Post by hawski »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #15

What would be a good hobbyist project to learn QNX?

I would like to explore it's IPC. I heard a lot of good about it. For example that it is has quite a nice API and is efficient.

Maybe I will tell it all wrong, but I remember that for example it could be easy to do RPC on the same machine for the isolation. A client calls the server and the scheduler would switch context immediately to the server process upon IPC.

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

#67

Post by stackghost »

Animats wrote: post #45

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 th…

Shitty dx is baked into RIM/Blackberry's institutional DNA.

I had a long conversation with their engineering people way back before BB10 came out. At the time you had to apply to get access to the full blackberry SDK, and IIRC you also had to sign an NDA. Meanwhile Android and iOS were in full swing and wouldn't you know it, the platforms that had better developer experience, that prioritized making it easy to write apps, were successful.

Blackberry is just institutionally incapable of handling this sort of relationship with the community. It's that legacy telco "us vs them" mindset at the top of the org, and it filters down whether implicitly or explicitly.

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

#68

Post by fauria »

fulafel wrote: post #65
fauria wrote: post #60

In case you are wondering: QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system owned by BlackBerry, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. From https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx

The "unix-like" characterisation seems it might be be from the Wikipedia QNX article and repeated by a lot of web content. But it doesn't seem really accurate to me and it's not used by their own web site or documentation. It seems quite opposite to Unix in a lot of ways even though it has some API compatibility.

You should update the Wikipedia article in that case.

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

#69

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Animats wrote: post #45

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 th…

> 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.

One option: Dual-license as GPLv3 (the 3 is important!) or commercial license. Hobbyists and FOSS projects will be quite happy to use a GPLv3 OS. The big commercial users - traditionally cars and other embedded uses - will not want to be legally obligated to give users the ability to install custom firmware (which GPLv3 basically requires), so they'll still pay for it. Everyone wins.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice, interpret licenses yourself.)

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

#70

Post by wolrah »

simlevesque wrote: post #26
foolswisdom wrote: post #14

For anyone who (like me) was confused at what this is, it's a Unix like OS for embedded systems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

They are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.

> They are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.

I would seriously doubt that QNX or anything like it resembling a "real OS" is running on the automatic transmission. If the transmission controller is running any OS at all it's likely a microcontroller running a much more specialized RTOS.

QNX is very common in automotive applications, but in things like digital instrument clusters and ADAS where the software is complex enough to benefit from a full networkable OS with support for a lot of different high speed buses but the use case still needs real-time guarantees and/or microkernel stability. I've specifically seen QNX's hypervisor marketed for digital clusters where the critical data display and interaction with the ECU could happen within a fully certified QNX environment that would be designed to be as stable and reliable as possible while allowing infotainment applications to run in a VM instance of Android, Linux, or even more QNX where software reliability was less critical. If it crashes, the important instruments are still working.

Ford's "Sync 3" and "Sync 4/4A" infotainment systems run on QNX as well, though being just infotainment they didn't really care about the realtime aspect (though I'm sure stability was a big thing compared to their Windows CE based predecessors). They've moved to Android for their latest revision.

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