Comment by bregma
13 days ago
If you're looking for something like QNX you could use... QNX. It's still around and free for hobbyists [0]. You can use it knowing you're using the same OS as your car, or train, or medical device, or spacecraft.
13 days ago
If you're looking for something like QNX you could use... QNX. It's still around and free for hobbyists [0]. You can use it knowing you're using the same OS as your car, or train, or medical device, or spacecraft.
You still have to register with them, I'm not sure that is common among NC licenses. I assume this also means its not really open-source (or compatible with open collaboration) if they are gatekeeping (via licences) the free dev licence.
Also consider this - If you got a licence would this "taint" you if you ever wanted to work on a project like OPs? As in, the registration is proof you could access the proprietary QNX code, forming the basis of a lawsuit.
Quantum has muddied the waters considerably here by at some point releasing the code under a fully open license. They tried hard to reverse that decision but I'm sure there are still copies of that version floating around.
In contrast to Minix 3.0+, no version of QNX has ever been fully open. At its most permissive, it was made available (behind a form submission) under a look-but-don't-touch All Rights Reserved sourceware license.
After previous rugpull, why anyone would want to jump through the hoops?
Yes. The history is awful. Closed source, partially open source with free version, closed source, fully open source with free version (but not for commercial use), and then, suddenly one day, closed source. Twenty years ago, many of the Gnu tools built for QNX by default. That stopped.
You can get a "personal use license" now, but you can't distribute anything that has parts of QNX code in it.
From what people reported around the rugpull, BB pretty much nuked all customer relationships with various groups that had commercial licenses too, not just with people who looked into open source or free-as-in-beer options.
Greatly accelerated AGL with D-Bus (yuck) as patchwork replacement for QNX IPC
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All of the acquisitions and license issues did QnX no favors. We built a very large installation on top of it and always felt that Quantum didn't really know what they wanted to be. The BB acquisition was the final nail in the coffin, though, as a platform it was a pretty good illustration of how powerful that whole mechanism is.
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