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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

#301

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #200
scheme271 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Real time" is only good if you need guaranteed responsiveness within certain time limits. It can actually be suboptimal and slow you down if you don't need it and want to optimize other things like throughput.

Who needs throughput? Server software, but Linux is already dominant there and everyone's happy. For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.

> Who needs throughput? Server software, but Linux is already dominant there and everyone's happy. For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.

No, not at all. The actual question is who needs realtime.

Desktop is a typical place where you absolutely don't need realtime. You just want latency to be under the user perception threshold but that's easily achievable with a standard kernel. Plus the consequence of failing is basically nil. Why bother with the complexity introduced by a RT kernel?

The latency in modern desktop is not a consequence of unpredictable scheduling. It's just poorly optimised applications. A RT kernel is not a magical solution to that.

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

#302

Post by Woeps »

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.

I don't know QNX, never heard of them.

But the name and reputation of Blackberry are not things I would consider ... stellar or relevant...

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

#303

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

dholm wrote: post #287
xp84 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bac…

This was most certainly not the case when using CD burners in windows 9x. I remember my friend being afraid of even moving the mouse while burning a CD.

Yes, but that was actual contention for resources resulting in the CD-R drive's buffer not being filled in time to keep the write operation going.

That's quite different from the operating system choosing to shoot the CD writing software in the head because you looked away from it for a moment.

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

#304

Post by pjmlp »

Y_Y wrote: post #294
pjmlp wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically most of the embedded folks that used GCC forks are now on clang, and if in the old days they were breaching GPL, nowadays they are fully compilant, so not upstreaming is not even a legal issue any longer.

Fair enough. I guess you're talking about microcontrollers rather than lightweight CPUs, at least in my experience it's still standard to use GCC on the sort of dinky ARM-based devices my company produces. I'll note that GPL never says anything about upstreaming. It can certainly make life easier if you want to keep your patches up to date and hand off maintenance responsibility, but it suffices to make a written off…

Sure, but they didn't even do that most of the time, with MIT that isn't even part of the conversation.

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

#305

Post by lolinder »

jraph wrote: post #249
lolinder wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the network services they provide. This is actually fairly ambiguous in the text. It says "if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently o…

Yep, I think the agplv3 behaves like the gplv3 for programs that are not network services. With the twist that if your non networked, agplv3 program happens to contain code that's interesting to build a network service, this code can only be used under the agplv3 :-)

> this code can only be used under the agplv3 :-)

This code can only be used to make a derived work under the AGPLv3. What constitutes a derived work is still... complicated.

I wouldn't risk this in a production setting for a real business just out of caution, but my reading of the license would suggest that you'd be perfectly fine to wrap AGPLv3 code in a web service and then have your own code interact with that web service. Release the wrapper service as AGPL, but then the rest can be proprietary.

The main protection that AGPL gives isn't legal, it's that you scare most legal departments away just because it's such a weird license with no established precedent.

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

#306

Post by elahav »

I think people are looking at this announcement the wrong way. If you are a hobbyist who is happy with a free OS you currently use, asking yourself "what's in it for me?" then the answer is: probably nothing. But if you are interested in QNX, want to see what it can do, maybe try a project or learn how to write drivers for a microkernel-based OS, you now have a free option.

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

#307

Post by ksaj »

nrclark wrote: post #90

@JohnAtQNX can you remove the "everybody needs an account" restriction from your website downloads, and also remove the license mechanism from qcc? That would go a long way towards encouraging hobbyists to try it out. Your money comes from high-volume licensing deals, where you presumably get a per-unit license fee. That revenue stream is jeopardized by pissing off the CI/CD teams that have to support QNX product lin…

Or at the very least, allow people to log in using other services, like Google, et al, that plenty of other sites are using.

I'm loathe to keep adding new logins every time something new comes about. Same with news feeds, where nearly half of all news sites want you to log in, even if it is "free." At least in that case, it's easy to just go elsewhere for the same story.

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

#308

Post by brynet »

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!

Your school might have had a PET or something, the ICONs were Canadian machines.. software had to be obtained from the government.

These machines didn't work at all without a server to network boot from, aka the LEXICON machine, so it's not likely some teacher squirreled all that across the border.

They were not commercially available.

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

#309

Post by jagermo »

relistan wrote: post #259
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 p…

Ubitexx?

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

#310

Post by CoastalCoder »

jonaias wrote: post #224
sitzkrieg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rt linux is not appropriate for many hard realtime requirements i have seen some try and fail in an effort to save $perceived_value

RT Linux is not the only alternative. There are now plenty of options for achieving hard real-time performance without relying on proprietary RTOS solutions: Dedicated Real-Time Cores: Many SoCs include dedicated cores specifically for hard real-time tasks. Microcontroller Companions: Pairing a microcontroller running a lightweight RTOS with a larger, general-purpose processor as a supervisor (You can use normal Linu…

Out of curiosity, to what extent can modern x86 / Arm systems support hard-realtime guarantees?

I'm wondering about things that could cause unexpected delays, like PCIe bus contention / error correction, high interrupt traffic, etc.

(I don't know much about this topic, so apologies if my question is ill-conceived.)

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