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

blackberry.qnx.com

271–280 of 380 posts

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

#271
15 years too late (since you last snatched QNX away from us), and with a license that you can revoke at any time. What are you blackberry folk smoking?

I guess your "benevolence" is no coincidence given that real-time support was merged into the linux kernel a month ago...

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

#272
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLVM exists because its original developers wanted to do research, not because of GPL and at the time there wasn't even a C compiler for it, not to mention that GCC wasn't designed at all to do what LLVM did. The license angle with Apple did happen because of GCC's switch to GPLv3 but that came years later - and GCC still wasn't (and AFAIK still isn't) designed to be used like LLVM or (later) Clang, like using it as…

They could have very well used lots or reusable parts of GCC. It was possible, and were many projects trying to change GCC.

[deleted]

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

#273
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLVM exists because its original developers wanted to do research, not because of GPL and at the time there wasn't even a C compiler for it, not to mention that GCC wasn't designed at all to do what LLVM did. The license angle with Apple did happen because of GCC's switch to GPLv3 but that came years later - and GCC still wasn't (and AFAIK still isn't) designed to be used like LLVM or (later) Clang, like using it as…

They could have very well used lots or reusable parts of GCC. It was possible, and were many projects trying to change GCC.

gcc was specifically designed to not have many reusable parts to avoid people ripping them out. modularity only happened after LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch.

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

#274
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real-time systems, QNX should be compared to FreeRTOS, CMSIS/RTX, VxWorks, or, if you after the new cool stuff, Zephyr, perhaps, but not Linux.

> but not Linux. I disagree. Linux merged the real time stuff ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594862 ) not so long ago so it's now a real-time capable kernel, and hence it should be held comparable to other real time kernels.

Good luck certifying an automotive or an industrial system that can lead to loss of life or severe disruption if it malfunctions. As far as I am aware, QNX, VxWorks, and CMSIS have all been used in systems that passed certifications. As IoT &co. get applied more broadly in our society, they are put in more places where they are expected to function flawlessly. I would rather want my power grid or water utility operator to use CMSIS, for example, than rt-linux.

The only serious user of rt-linux which uses it to build a hard-RT system that I know is SpaceX. Look up the Reddit AMA post from them on how rt-linux is used. They are staying on a specific kernel version, had to do kernel patches (other than applying rt-linux), they use a very specific model of an old Xeon for low latency interrupts, incorrect programming of one process can disrupt the RT behaviour of another process, and most importantly, they have a secondary board, a truly real time one (PowerPC based, IIRC) to communicate with the real hardware.

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

#276
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but not Linux. I disagree. Linux merged the real time stuff ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594862 ) not so long ago so it's now a real-time capable kernel, and hence it should be held comparable to other real time kernels.

Good luck certifying an automotive or an industrial system that can lead to loss of life or severe disruption if it malfunctions. As far as I am aware, QNX, VxWorks, and CMSIS have all been used in systems that passed certifications. As IoT &co. get applied more broadly in our society, they are put in more places where they are expected to function flawlessly. I would rather want my power grid or water utility operat…

[deleted]

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

#277
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…

Back before 2004, QNX could have still been relevant as there was still a lot of OS experimentation from the user/developer themsevels. They could have attracted enough people to carve a niche even in the desktop space at that time. After beos failed, I played/developed with QNX until they pulled the rug. I was on it full time on my main dev machine. I loved it. When they closed it I got severely burned to the point…

I remember being really excited about QNX for a few months after BeOS closed up. It had a cool desktop environment and was mostly posix so it was more or less familiar coming from Be or Linux.

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

#278
post #273
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have very well used lots or reusable parts of GCC. It was possible, and were many projects trying to change GCC.

gcc was specifically designed to not have many reusable parts to avoid people ripping them out. modularity only happened after LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch.

> LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch

I don't know how you can eat GCC's lunch. I feel like in this analogy GCC eats from a communal trough and is very happy to share. A company that sells licenses can lose customers, the GNU project just wants the world to benefit. GCC is still ubiquitous and has plenty of developers and mindshare, what more could they want?

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

#279
post #273
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have very well used lots or reusable parts of GCC. It was possible, and were many projects trying to change GCC.

gcc was specifically designed to not have many reusable parts to avoid people ripping them out. modularity only happened after LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch.

Most certainly not. The modularity was not great, but BIG chunks of code could be copied. I did that myself.
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