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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

#151

Post by hinkley »

baby_souffle wrote: post #144
stackghost wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was worse than an NDA! You also had to start your application with a trip to a notary to get your ID confirmed. And if their signing servers were down…You couldn’t load had just compiled onto your own dev / test device. I loved using my blackberry but I hated developing against it. Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx

One of the dirty secrets of the mobile industry, particularly before Apple showed up and spoiled all the fun, was how many execs and chunks of the ethos were airlifted out of Ma Bell. The kind of moat-building we're seeing take over the internet over the last couple decades is something that mobile carriers already had in heaps.

It was also common for carriers to extort very high fees from anyone selling apps on their platforms. People bitch and moan about Apple taking 30% (which is more like 15% now) but I saw mobile app execs complaining about only grossing 30% after the carrier fees, and so you could only either make blockbusters and pay for R&D on volume, or set your VC money on fire to fatten up the carriers and get nothing, except more powerful carriers, for your efforts.

I'm not at all surprised to hear that RIM was only slightly less evil.

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

#152

Post by parl_match »

gosub100 wrote: post #123
parl_match wrote: post #118

Why would I use QNX for any project when RTOS Linux is mature? Why would I care? So you can rug-pull license changes? Should I use it because it's cute? It's academically interesting? Sure, I've used QNX in the past for those reasons. The next time I pick a soc for a project, and its associated bsp, I'm not going to look for QNX. I'm either going to use whatever freertos distro they include or install the android bui…

You would use it if you wanted to get a job doing RTOS dev and wanted to show you had some skin in the game.

lmao "skin in the game". what a useless cliche.

that's such a lame excuse, and if for some stupid reason, i chose the rtos first, i would simply choose one of the many competitors that have positive mindshare and increasing install base. freertos, rt linux, hell even vxworks.

the simple fact is that rtos are more commodity than ever. if im going to start a project, im going to do it based on the requirements, find a soc and bsp that has excellent support for those requirements, and then follow up writing a task for whatever rtos it uses.

for example, im not using freertos because its "cute" and has a neat little floppy disk demo. im currently using amazon's freertos beceause that's what the espxx family supports. im using the esp32 because it has the power profile i need for my sensor project.

in today's market, it's absolutely asinine to choose the rtos first. i honestly have no idea what qnx is a first class citizen on anymore. I actually feel bad for anyone who's spent their whole career in QNX-land - that train might be coming to a stop and there's probably a lot of people who would rather not retrain.

actually, there's a nugget of wisdom in there for the qnx team: i should be able to buy a $20 board that runs qnx, and fits into the power, performance, and hardware profile of something like the esp32. integrate it heavily with platform.io. let me use qnx without having to specifically go and seek it out and hack on it a bunch.

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

#153

Post by gmueckl »

altairprime wrote: post #9

For QNX 8.0, here’s a saved-you-five-minutes direct link to the developer terms associated with noncommercial use: https://support7.qnx.com/download/download/51624/BB_QNX_Deve... (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice. This is not a comprehensive review, assessment, or summary of possible interpretations of that license. Seek professional counsel from a lawyer before acting on anything stated below.) These t…

Since when are social apps high risk? The high risk clause is clearly targeted at applications that have safety requirements (IEC 61508, ISO 26262 etc.). A crashing Twitter client won't injure or kill anyone.

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

#154

Post by rbanffy »

baby_souffle wrote: post #144
stackghost wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was worse than an NDA! You also had to start your application with a trip to a notary to get your ID confirmed. And if their signing servers were down…You couldn’t load had just compiled onto your own dev / test device. I loved using my blackberry but I hated developing against it. Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx

> Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx

I did some development for it but the bureaucracy killed my will to do more.

It was a great phone OS though. The real time nature makes even modest hardware responsive.

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

#155

Post by wisemang »

wwweston wrote: post #136
criddell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QNX was the OS behind the ICON computer that was used in schools across Ontario in the mid-80’s. At the time, I thought they were pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)

I think my (American) HS had two of these just a few years later, but I didn't remember any QNX connection!

I’d be very surprised! I thought it was very much an Ontario ministry of education thing.

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

#157

Post by wisemang »

criddell wrote: post #48
simlevesque wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

QNX was the OS behind the ICON computer that was used in schools across Ontario in the mid-80’s. At the time, I thought they were pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)

Discussed on HN at least once before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41163875

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

#158

Post by talldayo »

winocm wrote: post #149
dystnitem4r3 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more critically, dual-license commercial and AGPLv3 to avoid the AWS loophole (hosted services or source modifications without licensing it commercial.) AGPLv3 is perfect for kernel and userspace tools because, while it doesn't guarantee licensing revenues, as soon as they do anything to modify it they have to release those changes to ANY users of the system, whether downstream distributors or simply users of th…

My honest opinion is that the prevalence of licenses like GPLv3 and AGPLv3 end up indirectly leading to people recreating the wheel, rather than using the wheel that exists already.

I think wheel-reinvention is the perfect punishment for people that want to be stingy with their wheel development. Copyleft infringement deserves no more empathy than copyright infringement.

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

#159

Post by xp84 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #116
vundercind wrote: post #96

QNX and BeOS were the only operating systems I tried in the early '00s that could make old single-core mid-90s Pentiums feel excellent and snappy to use. Far, far better than any Windows version, or Linux. I assume it's mostly scheduler stuff and much better multimedia stacks, in both cases. I always hoped the operating systems of the future would feel more like that. Closest we've got is probably iOS and it cheats b…

iOS has very strict process/resource management because it wants to preserve both available RAM (for responsiveness) and your battery life. I wouldn't call it cheating (even in jest); it's a very deliberately and carefully designed feature of the OS.

Sure, and that's fair, but to me the "cheating" is more about how it is limited to only certain types of computing. On a Mac, or indeed any non-Apple OS since Windows 3.1, you've been able to for instance, start a long-running, resource-intensive process like encoding a video, minimize that window, and open say, Minesweeper or read a text file for an hour, all knowing that the OS wouldn't dare interfere with your background task. In iOS you can be assured that the moment you background an app, iOS can and will send something to kill it at any minute, and there's not even a way to explicitly allow a certain app to be immune from being killed, even on a one-time basis.

All of this is totally by design (and thinking only of phone handsets I'm sure some people would defend this), but it is maybe the #1 thing that prevents this otherwise capable hardware from being used for more things. (Not to mention how much it hamstrings iPad OS).

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

#160

Post by miki123211 »

apitman wrote: post #83
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…

Even getting the licensing right isn't sufficient. They could license it as MIT today, close source it again tomorrow, and within a few releases no one would be using the MIT version. Unless someone is interested in maintaining a full fork. It's the same reason Google can do whatever they want with Chromium even though it's technically open source. No one else has the resources/will to maintain it so there's no credi…

Between Microsoft on one hand and all the other browser companies (Opera, Brave etc) on the other, I wouldn't be so sure.

Following Google's lead is massively cheaper than having a custom fork or engine, but it's not impossible. If Google does something wild and unpalatable to all these companies, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Linux Foundation version of Chromium, with custom skins on top.

That could even get Mozilla to jump on the bandwagon, especially if they lose 9x percent of their revenue due to Google's antitrust remedies, which is not that unlikely.

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