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QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
261–270 of 380 posts
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thei…
Was this North America specific. I remember using sdk/dev tools for Symbian. I don't remember timelines, so maybe they changed after iPhone release.
If I recall correctly the Symbian SDK was freely available more or less from the Psion start. Not sure about it's different "editions" though.
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#263Hey, what iPIs are supported ?
I have an old first-gen raspberry pi, would QNX work on that ?
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
RTEMS is one and there is also eCOS. RTEMS has flown in space a few times so it is proven. Forgot to mention: the neat part of RTEMS is it allows one to sort of turn a Unix program into a bare metal program.
Why do RTEMS and eCOS trump, say, Linux? Linux on a RPi has also famously flown (really!) in space. It's all very well asserting something but a bit more chat would be nice. I'm not sure what "turn a Unix program into a bare metal program." means.
As it has been already said, with RTEMS and other similar real-time operating systems it is easy to predict the worst case time for the handling of any event. This is absolutely necessary when controlling many kinds of hardware devices.
This is completely impossible with standard Linux. Real-time Linux might offer some guarantees, but I am pretty sure that they are rather soft.
Linux is already too big to be easy to understand and audit in order to be certain that you really know which will be the worst case.
With a simple OS like RTEMS, a competent programmer can become an expert in its internals in a month or so, and then it is easy to understand what exactly will happen in any circumstance.
I have used in the past some commercial real-time operating systems, like pSOS and VxWorks, but the free RTEMS has been much better than those, especially because being open-source it allows a much deeper customization than any proprietary solution.
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#265Can we still put QNX on a 1.44M floppy and boot from it?
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#266Earlier 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.
> For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.
Why on earth would you need real time on desktop? Every time the topic is discussed on internet bunch of confused people chime in with this sentiment that doesn't make much sense. "RTOS" is not some magic that somehow makes everything on your desktop fast. All it would do in reality is make everything slower for 99% of your interaction but guarantee that "slowness" is uniform and you don't have any weird latency spikes in other 1%. Note that for cases that are not "nuclear reactor control system that requires Very Certified OS with audited and provable reaction times" RTLinux is already available, but distros are not inclined to leverage it on desktop for reason described above.
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#267You can get 30-day trial, Partner or Academic license. So what's new exactly?
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#268With linux options in embedded space aplenty, who would want to move to a propriety os? QNX's big brother Vxworks has already been pushed out of most consumer embedded devices and is now limited to space probes and critical medical equipment. I just don't see a future for QNX anywhere.
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.
Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#269To add some details - the source code for QNX was available from 2007 until the takeover by RIM/Blackberry in 2010. So do you plan to offer access to QNX source code again in the future? https://www.qnx.com/news/pr_2471_1.html
Don't hold me to timelines, but we're definitely headed in the direction of being more open and transparent. We're hearing that this is important to our customers and the community alike. Stay tuned!
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Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
#270If 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…
> Now, if QNX is serious about this, the way to go is to use the licensing model Epic uses for Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is behind most AAA game titles. The basic terms are that you can download the source and use it for anything you want, and there's no charge until you get the first $1 million in revenue from your product. Then Epic takes a 5% royalty.[2] This has been extremely successful for Epic. There's not…
> The big commercial users - traditionally cars and other embedded uses - will not want to be legally obligated to give users the ability to install custom firmware (which GPLv3 basically requires), so they'll still pay for it. Everyone wins.
Yes. And it is even more than that.
Blackberry could have a general QNX verison under AGPLv3 and keep the "safety certified" version proprietary and they would not loose a single customer.
What the automotive world, robotic world and others are paying for is not standalone QNX... it is the safety-critical certified version of QNX.
It is easy to understand: Making an RTOS is easy. Making an RTOS (and a compiler) ASIL-D ISO-26262 certified is a freaking nightmare. And this is why companies are paying for QNX.
Opening the QNX source code under GPL would increase significantly the number of software ported on QNX and consequently the adoption of QNX.
Unfortunately, Blackberry is way too stupid to do it: It is not in their culture. That is very unlikely to happen.