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Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

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Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#41

Post by hoodoof »

revelation wrote: post #16
JoshTriplett wrote: post #10

The most useful aspect of this, from my perspective: they've finally abolished the non-FOSS license of the old FreeRTOS, and released it under an actually Open Source license, namely MIT. That's one less headache to deal with.

It's a nice present from Amazon. They should keep doing this, I'd like a MIT licensed QNX next please. God knows they have the money.

Yeah but the important question is what about the future investment into these projects? Is there any, or is it just a throwaway thing that Amazon does?

Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#42

Post by patja »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #39

>Amazon FreeRTOS ... and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud? Is there any legitimate use case other than reporting data gathered on the customer? Why do have all these gadgets have to snoop on us?

When I think of IoT I think of devices gathering data, and the data has to go somewhere to be useful. What's the alternative to putting it in the cloud, self-hosting the storage? That's what I would do, but I think it is a pretty niche market who wants to deal with the storage, backing it up, etc.

Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#43

Post by inamberclad »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #39

>Amazon FreeRTOS ... and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud? Is there any legitimate use case other than reporting data gathered on the customer? Why do have all these gadgets have to snoop on us?

If you're going to sell a consumer an internet connected device, they're probably going to assume that it'll work on its own and they can review and adjust things on a website (that isn't a 192.0.0.*)

Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#44

Post by patja »

Hasz wrote: post #23

What's the advantage of a RTOS?

Not having to worry about a more complex OS burping, leaking, or otherwise failing on you. As one poster on the Arduino forums explained it to me once, "you never know when Linux is going to nip off for a cup of tea and interrupt your program with some system overhead tasks." You are going to get your n cycles per second, every second.

Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#45

Post by LeifCarrotson »

HankB99 wrote: post #36

The "Get Started For Free" button on the front page has an ominous ring to it. I wonder (hope!) that the free version available from FreeRTOS.org remains available w/out an AWS account.

Amazon has ownership of FreeRTOS.org now, but the good news is that they are licensing it under the MIT license. Even if they hide the official download link behind an AWS login, there will be plenty of public mirrors.

This is actually an improvement over the old "FreeRTOS open source license", which was basically the GPL plus:

> FreeRTOS may not be used for any competitive or comparative purpose, including the publication of any form of run time or compile time metric, without the express permission of Real Time Engineers Ltd.

A strange exception, which ostensibly prevented you from running benchmarks? But the GPL prohibits the addition of such clauses?

But now it's just plain MIT. Super easy.

Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#46

Post by finnn »

apple4ever wrote: post #28
JoshTriplett wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL would be fine too; I'd just like something that actually qualifies as FOSS, rather than something proprietary.

GPL is also a non-FOSS license. It says it is, but its not. Can't wait until the GPL is a rarely used license.

Would you care to elaborate on what you believe makes the GPL a non-FOSS license?

Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#48

Post by ronsor »

michaelt wrote: post #18
jore wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems it is exactly freeRTOS, but with some additional drivers and libs so not changing the name seems to be a good decision I think. I am wondering however if by using this os, the dev is obliged to use aws services. Isn't this more of a limitation than a benefit?

According to [1] "FreeRTOS remains open source, with no commitments. [...] FreeRTOS users are not required to be AWS customers in any way." Most likely Amazon's motivation is that they can make sure FreeRTOS makes using Amazon's services very easy; there are some IoT offerings that can't connect to Amazon's services, (or at least can't connect easily) [2] By making sure FreeRTOS can easily pull in the right libraries…

The latest axtls port for esp8266 supports TLS 1.2.

Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers

#49

Post by CamperBob2 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #39

>Amazon FreeRTOS ... and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud? Is there any legitimate use case other than reporting data gathered on the customer? Why do have all these gadgets have to snoop on us?

why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud?

Because otherwise you're in the business of explaining to non-technical users how to open up ports in their NAT firewalls and do other fun things required to make the device Just Work(tm) from any Internet connection.

It's important IMO for device vendors to offer as many options as possible in that regard. Ideally it should be possible to use a given device with a paid service sponsored by the manufacturer, a free service run by anyone else, a private server running on the customer's own LAN, or with no external servers at all.

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