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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

#251

Post by karlgkk »

EasyMark wrote: post #227
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…

Name/reputation still means a lot to some people, as does not learning yet another OS. Not everyone cares if something is FOSS or not. Different people have different leaning when it comes to this stuff, and that shouldn't be surprising.

> Name/reputation still means a lot to some people, as does not learning yet another OS

Great, people on QNX can keep using it. A stagnating user base doesn't make for a good business.

> Not everyone cares if something is FOSS or not.

No, but I would rather not enter into onerous licensing terms if better ones exist

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

#252

Post by hulitu »

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…

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

Microsoft realized that a long time ago. That's why you could always get Windows for free if you knew where to look.

QNX will lose even more since linux merged the RT patches. There is almost no reason to use QNX on an embedded system where linux is also available.

It is sad. With GNU it could have been something interesting.

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

#253

Post by karlgkk »

cbsks wrote: post #219
ryukoposting wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you would have used QNX as an engineer flex in 2012, but as an embedded firmware dev myself, I'd laugh if someone suggested we use QNX for anything. Besides the licensing issues... just why? It confers no imaginable benefit versus any one of dozens of alternatives. It's like if someone suggested I run Haiku on my work laptop.

ISO 26262 ASIL D safety certification, mature tooling and ecosystem, easy to hire experienced devs, “it worked for the last 5 projects”, etc.

There's a few vendors that sell FreeRTOS forks that have that cert. SAFERTOS is a very common one

> mature tooling and ecosystem

Amazon has been working on freertos for a long time

> easy to hire experienced devs

tbh if you've used one rtos, you've used them all. the learning curve is in the concepts, not the api. any good vendor will have engineering support that helps you where appropriate

> “it worked for the last 5 projects”

inertia only takes you so far

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

#254

Post by karlgkk »

intern4tional wrote: post #195
sov wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any commercial rtos shop where QNX may be appropriate is either using 1. some wacky expensive proprietary rtos that you've never heard of, 2. freertos or 3. real-time linux depending on what they need. asking what makes QNX a compelling rtos when freertos exists, is widely supported and used, and has an MIT license is a very valid question. further, no one in embedded actually cares what RTOS you used. they are all s…

QNX is heavily used in industries where functional safety or particular high assurance models are required. Sure FreeRTOS has a SafeRTOS mode, but its not sufficiently functional for a modern ADAS stack or complex robotics systems. QNX is used in all major automotive companies around the world for a reason, and a crucial part of NVIDIA's DriveOS stack.

> and a crucial part of NVIDIA's DriveOS stack

fwiw they have been working hard to support linux as a second option, and have been major contributors to Real Time Linux

sooooooo

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

#256

Post by Woshiwuja »

krapp wrote: post #191
Havoc wrote: post #190

For the love of god put what the thing is into the first sentence. Still have no idea wth qnx is

If you don't already know, or can't even be bothered to read their linked site, you probably aren't the target audience.

[dead]

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

#259

Post by relistan »

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…

I worked for a startup in Germany that was acquired by RIM/Blackberry in 2011. The company tried to get all the employees to sign new contracts for their existing roles and pay. The new contracts put severe IP limitations on everyone. All open source was forbidden. Many of us were very active in open source at the time. (I had worked for the Eclipse Foundation). A friend who wrote fiction was told he’d need written permission for each story he wanted to post or publish. They insisted that German engineers sign contracts where the binding language was English even though it was provided with a German translation. Many of us just left instead. My favorite line from the transition team sent from Canada was about how lucky we were going to be that they’d let us keep our awesome office in Munich because everyone at RIM worked in dark concrete dungeons. Yeah, how lucky we were that we could keep what we had.

Open anything is just completely foreign to that company’s DNA. I would not trust them an inch.

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