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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

#161

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#162

Post by cmrdporcupine »

stackghost wrote: post #67
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…

From the people I know who worked there, same crap in internal culture, too.

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

#163

Post by karmakaze »

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.

Working as intended. If they don't want to share, then they can't benefit.

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

#165

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me 3 or more times, and I'd need to get my head checked for possible brain damage.

I feel bad for saying this because probably someone out there spent energy building political capital in the organisation and has stuck their neck out a bit to make this happen, but yeah, I'll have a look and a play, but no way would I invest serious energy into the QNX platform with these current terms.

Not that you're missing anything. I'm no wizard.

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

#166

Post by snvzz »

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…

>QNX went open source.

Not open source. Those words have a specific definition[0], which QNX never met.

0. https://opensource.org/osd

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

#167

Post by kragen »

JohnAtQNX wrote: post #109
justin66 wrote: post #101

@JohnAtQNX the way to put the rug-pulling concerns to bed is to license all the source code under the ISC License, BSD 2-clause License, or MIT License. This would certainly have an impact once that was done. Of course I cannot speak to what that would do to your software business...

I hear it loud and clear. We're certainly in the early days of this initiative, but as things progress I'll make sure to bring up source code licensing as a community concern.

Things aren't going to progress if you are asking people to risk you rugging them a third time. They have alternative operating systems to invest their time in that are safer.

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

#170

Post by snvzz »

Animats wrote: post #81
mikercampbell wrote: post #50

With all due respect, I’ve never spent so long clicking through a website trying to figure out what it actually was. What is QNX haha

QNX is a microkernel-based real time operating system. The kernel is tiny; it was about 60KB (not MB) twenty years ago. All the kernel does is message passing, timers, CPU dispatching, and memory allocation. Everything else is in user space, including file systems. Everything is a message, rather than being a file. Messaging works like a function call - you send a block of data to another process, wait, and get a rep…

>Microkernel done right.

That'd be seL4.

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