4 ms·

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

by bregma 1y 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. [0] https://www.qnx.com/products/everywhere/ https://www.qnx.com/products/everywhere/

Chris2048 1y ago
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.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  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.
  - cxr 1y ago
    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.
p_l 1y ago
After previous rugpull, why anyone would want to jump through the hoops?
- Animats 1y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    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.
    - Animats 1y ago
      Yes. The ownership by Harmon (an audio company) was clueless, and Blackberry was, strangely, no better. I once told one of their marketing guys "Quit worrying about being pirated and worry more about being ignored." I wonder if a business model like Epic's would have worked. Unreal Engine is free until you hit US$1 million in revenue, and then they want a cut of revenue. This works in games because any game with significant revenue is publicly visible. Less so in operating systems. You could have QNX inside a million traffic lights without anybody knowing.
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        The problem with operating systems is that if they work well they're all but invisible. They only attract attention when they malfunction. QNX allowed us to focus on the problems we were solving, rather than that it drew a lot of attention to itself. I walked into a project that was already years underway and started working on core application components within a few weeks of reading the QNX manual (which I thought was excellent, by the way, not unlike the documentation that came with Mark Williams C). The OS was facilitating what you wanted to do rather than that you were fighting it every step of the way. The main application we wrote (and of which I rewrote significant chunks) processed a record number of messages on every Monday morning, week after week, year after year. It was a massive cash cow for the company that had commissioned it (KVSA, https://www.kvsa.nl/en/data-and-intelligence/bts-broker-tools/ https://www.kvsa.nl/en/data-and-intelligence/bts-broker-tool... , it is still alive but it no longer runs on QNX) and if not for QNX I doubt it would have gotten as far as it did. Especially in those first few years when it was mostly my old boss and one or two helpers building it. The OS pretty much enforced clean abstraction layers by showing at the OS level itself how this was done. Extending that was a natural path and I suspect that many QNX shops did this simply because it felt right and made it easy. They likely did not realize they were building what we would call a 'service oriented architecture' many years later and in a completely different context. This experience still leaves me looking at many of the systems we use today as unnecessarily bloated and frankly, quite ugly. QNX was light weight, but not a lightweight. The only other eco-systems that give me that same feeling are Plan9 and Erlang.

by bregma 1y ago

Chris2048 1y ago

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.

jacquesm 1y ago
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.
- cxr 1y ago
  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.

p_l 1y ago

After previous rugpull, why anyone would want to jump through the hoops?

Animats 1y ago
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.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  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.
  - Animats 1y ago
    Yes. The ownership by Harmon (an audio company) was clueless, and Blackberry was, strangely, no better. I once told one of their marketing guys "Quit worrying about being pirated and worry more about being ignored." I wonder if a business model like Epic's would have worked. Unreal Engine is free until you hit US$1 million in revenue, and then they want a cut of revenue. This works in games because any game with significant revenue is publicly visible. Less so in operating systems. You could have QNX inside a million traffic lights without anybody knowing.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      The problem with operating systems is that if they work well they're all but invisible. They only attract attention when they malfunction. QNX allowed us to focus on the problems we were solving, rather than that it drew a lot of attention to itself. I walked into a project that was already years underway and started working on core application components within a few weeks of reading the QNX manual (which I thought was excellent, by the way, not unlike the documentation that came with Mark Williams C). The OS was facilitating what you wanted to do rather than that you were fighting it every step of the way. The main application we wrote (and of which I rewrote significant chunks) processed a record number of messages on every Monday morning, week after week, year after year. It was a massive cash cow for the company that had commissioned it (KVSA, https://www.kvsa.nl/en/data-and-intelligence/bts-broker-tools/ https://www.kvsa.nl/en/data-and-intelligence/bts-broker-tool... , it is still alive but it no longer runs on QNX) and if not for QNX I doubt it would have gotten as far as it did. Especially in those first few years when it was mostly my old boss and one or two helpers building it. The OS pretty much enforced clean abstraction layers by showing at the OS level itself how this was done. Extending that was a natural path and I suspect that many QNX shops did this simply because it felt right and made it easy. They likely did not realize they were building what we would call a 'service oriented architecture' many years later and in a completely different context. This experience still leaves me looking at many of the systems we use today as unnecessarily bloated and frankly, quite ugly. QNX was light weight, but not a lightweight. The only other eco-systems that give me that same feeling are Plan9 and Erlang.