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

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 three years when working on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle.

All of that went away after the Harman acquisition of QNX in 2004.

Then, in 2007, QNX went open source. You could even look at the microkernel. It wasn't openly licensed, but you could look inside and build it.

In 2010, RIM acquired QNX, and, with no warning, closed the source. All open source development related to QNX ceased, and QNX lost all credibility in the community. So QNX shot itself in the foot. Twice.

Note the contractual terms.[1] "TERMINATION. This Agreement and licenses granted hereunder may be terminated by either Party upon written notice to the other Party". QNX can pull the plug at any time. Since they've done so twice in the past, there's a good chance that will happen again.

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 much of a piracy problem, because if your game gets enough revenue to matter, it has enough visibility that their licensing people will notice. Meanwhile, there's a large pool of people using Unreal Engine.

That's the way to do it if you want more adoption of QNX. Take the Epic term sheet to your lawyers and management. And have them take a look at Unreal Engine's revenue growth vs. QNX.

As I once told a QNX sales rep, your problem isn't that you're being pirated. It's that you're being ignored.

[1] http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=51624

[2] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/UnrealEngine/faq/UnrealEngineE...

For QNX 8.0, here’s a saved-you-five-minutes direct link to the developer terms associated with noncommercial use:

https://support7.qnx.com/download/download/51624/BB_QNX_Deve...

(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice. This is not a comprehensive review, assessment, or summary of possible interpretations of that license. Seek professional counsel from a lawyer before acting on anything stated below.)

These terms open with a ‘user did not have an opportunity to review and agree before binding themselves, their business, and/or their institution’ clause that may well wholly invalidate the entire document in the US, so please review these with your lawyer before use, so that your usage is not put at risk due to legalese overreach.

Academics, only students and faculty of your institution qualify, and your usage under this license will be viewed by your legal team as you signing a binding agreement on behalf of your employer; make sure you’re not exposed to liability through open source contributors or at risk of being fired for misrepresenting yourself as a signing authority for your institution.

Cloud users, your license is restricted to AWS per their terms; use on GCP, Heroku, or any other server instance not under your personal contractual control may result in owing licensing fees.

Only OSI definitions of “Open Source” are permissible here; this disqualifies anyone licensing software under a restrictive non-commercial license from making use of the QNX non-commercial license, as per OSI, all such restrictions are not “open source”.

Social apps are excluded by the “high risk” clause, which prohibits any use under these terms to develop applications that could harm society. Take care not to create viral applications that violate this clause.

They collect and retain all serial numbers identifiable on all hardware you use in association with this product.

Your noncommercial license may be severed unconditionally at any time without recourse, regardless of whether you have faithfully complied with the terms; at which time you may be compelled under contract to provide an undefined ‘certification’ of indeterminate cost that you deleted all QNX code provided to you.

Stay safe, folks.

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 build tools so i can push an apk to its wackity ass android fork.

I suppose if i was doing automotive or medical, the story would be different. But I know the space well enough to know that you have many competitors all nipping at your heels, and with the linux rtos changes, it's not going to get better.

This is not 2010. There are options. While QNX has languished behind obscure and annoying licensing requirements, literally dozens of companies have been developing alternatives. Some of them are quite big, and in some cases, have gone to space.

At this point, if you want QNX to be taken seriously, you're going to have to do better than "start opening the doors to QNX like things used to be".

I'll take it one step further - if it's not completely open source for commercial use, I have no interest in using it. I could be enticed to put up with an Epic-style license if the associated tooling and bsp support was worth my time. I have zero interest in paying a license to get started. Again - not 2010.

Your product has been commoditized and now it's a curiosity. The only way it gets enough active development and adoption is if its a community effort.

QNX and BeOS were the only operating systems I tried in the early '00s that could make old single-core mid-90s Pentiums feel excellent and snappy to use. Far, far better than any Windows version, or Linux.

I assume it's mostly scheduler stuff and much better multimedia stacks, in both cases. I always hoped the operating systems of the future would feel more like that. Closest we've got is probably iOS and it cheats by killing processes all the time. The future is lame.

To 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

My previous company, which made high-availability (Active/Standby) routers for mobile networks, used QNX as the OS. I remain impressed by its capabilities.

My memory is rusty, but we ran QNX on the control-plane processors, and it natively allowed launching processes on remote processors over the internal network of the router. That is: their low-level IPC was IP-capable. QNX's IPC was essential for our HA failover functionality.

Also, device drivers as user-space processes that you could restart on crash was great (we were developing our network drivers, so this would occasionally happen). Also, better respect for devices actually showing up in the /dev/ tree, unlike Linux where network devices are a notable exception.

One funny story, I once spent days debugging an issue which turned out to be due to me accidentally marking const the return values of some IPC, which caused my process to crash in between QNX's IPC function and mine! Whatever level of debugger (C/userspace) I was using at the time could not catch the error ^^;

@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 lines.

I still remember being blown away by the single-floppy QNX demo that included a web browser. It was so fast.

I wish you guys the best. I can only imagine what a gordian knot it must be getting all the legal ducks in a row to actually open things up. Like others have mentioned, after two rug pulls, we're all wary, but there's so much to enjoy about QNX, I hope you manage to get traction with this.

We (Rizin) would love to improve QNX support of our FOSS reverse engineering and debugging framework. We already support[1][2][3][4] it, but can't reliably test. Would be awesome to have the QEMU image out of the box, just like Windows provides ready to use limited VMs for testing[5].

[1] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/tree/dev/librz/bin/format/...

[2] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/blob/dev/librz/bin/p/bin_q...

[3] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/blob/dev/librz/debug/p/deb...

[4] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/tree/dev/subprojects/rzqnx

[5] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...

Kudos on your bold undertaking! I've been a side-lined QNX admirer for some time, though not a potential user in most cases. A good next step would be a series of blog posts where the author takes on common types of enthusiast projects and unpacks how QNX's strengths can be applied in those scenarios.

I’ve had a lot of experience in developing on QNX over the years, and with each successive year, the call to migrate to Linux got stronger. The day to day developer experience is great, you can very easily setup a CMake toolchain and bypass the need for QNX’s Momentics, which if you’re just developing for QNX is something you will want to do. But, in my experience the driver support simply isn’t there, and that became painful. A fair few major board manufacturers treat QNX integration as a complete afterthought, and at a point you start to feel that this is directly related to RIM’s decision to shutdown source access to QNX. I’ve since left that company, but I imagine there is still a call to use Linux.

QNX is squeezed from above by Linux, especially as real time patches have finally been fully accepted. And from below by FreeRTOS and Zephyr. Current attempt to open source is a desperate move by QNX as their market share is disappearing. Why would anyone in their right mind step on the same landmine, called QNX, which already pulled a rug from under the developers feet once? Absolutely no trust in QNX ecosystem. Save yourself pain and aggregation. Don’t use QNX.

For anyone who (like me) was confused at what this is, it's a Unix like OS for embedded systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

I don't have great expectations for this, we've been rug pulled before.

https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-onc...

They then killed the self-hosted QNX entirely, no downloadable .ISOs after 6.5. No working toolchain, so porting software became difficult, pkgsrc abandoned.

They are completely noncommittal, nothing short of actually open-sourcing it, MIT/BSD, would convince me otherwise.

15 years too late (since you last snatched QNX away from us), and with a license that you can revoke at any time. What are you blackberry folk smoking?

I guess your "benevolence" is no coincidence given that real-time support was merged into the linux kernel a month ago...

Please consider bringing back some legacy software.

When I was learning computers, we learned on QNX (poor kids younger than I started on Windows!) and there were some very interesting software packages that I think don't exist anymore.

For example, QPaint. What made it interesting, is that you could save your image in a few image formats, or as a C header for inclusion in a C program. It could also import/export Logo generated images.

There was also a software voice module. I assume it had different voices because when it was demoed to us, it was a robot guy voice, but later there was an educational graphical interface that looked like a girl's face, and it of course had a female voice when it spoke. It would be strange to have two things do exactly the same thing, so I suspect they were the same software for speech.

I think it was simply invoked with 'speak'. We used to prank other students by speak -something- /dev/tty.... where the tty pointed to other people's nodes on the server network. Fun times!

In case you are wondering: QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system owned by BlackBerry, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market.

From https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx

With 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.

> Develop open-source software (OSS) that is interoperable with QNX software, provided you make the resulting OSS publicly available at no charge.

Even the GPL doesn't have this restriction...

@JohnAtQNX the way to put the rug-pulling concerns to bed is to license all the source code under the ISC License, BSD 2-clause License, or MIT License.

This would certainly have an impact once that was done. Of course I cannot speak to what that would do to your software business...

Typical marketing euphemism: "Built-in Support for Open-Source Components"

Read: we take free things thankfully, but we don't live by the same standards.

This is very interesting and I'm happy to see this. It's probably not relevant but i'm remembering reaching out 20+ years ago for a license to use in a Darpa GC team and getting a quote for 16K which made it unavailable for our make shift team but I have a tremendous amount of respect for the company and their work to build QNX. I will probably be looking into this for something in the future.

Thanks, John. QNX has always been one of my favourite OSs (I still have my Blackberry Q10) since I learned C on it in the mid 1980’s. A full-featured multi-tasking OS running from a 360K floppy on a PC/XT is not something easily forgotten.

I’m glad the company is making this investment again.

We need to start treating “non-commercial” as the ambivalent term that it is.

Eg: All “non-profit” and “personal” use likely isn’t necessarily “non-commercial”, but those two can be easily identified based on who it is that makes use of the software.

So what is the definition of “non-commercial”? Nothing in itself. Eg. Creative Commons elaborates a lot on what it means in that context: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpre...

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.

20 years too late but ok.

GPL it or we pretend nothing has changed at all. No more indian-giving, put up or buy an ad!

I was excited to see "free", and even more excited to read "like things used to be", but after reading more closely I see it's merely free-as-in-gratis, as opposed to the more interesting definitions.

I don't want to create an account just to know if it'll work on a pi zero w, will it?

Reminds me of this guy:

https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/qnx-7-desktop/

I found this a while back. Unsure if it's related https://github.com/vocho/openqnx

(I prefer 32-bit because most applications don't need more than 4GB RAM, but I guess 64-bit could be useful too)

TIL the Blackberry brand still exists in this space. Similar to Nokia I suppose, the consumer side no longer exists but the enterprise side is still going.

"... plus there's an RPi image"

Maybe. But there is no direct link to an RPi image. It's layer upon layer of agreements and consents. Not simple. Too much reading.

I think I still have a tarball of the QNX source code from circa 2008.

I hope the QNX can fix their antiquated password process on this site. Apparently I still had an account from the last time they opened things up, and I asked for a password reset. I received a six character temporary password by email and used that log in. Then when I changed the password (which wasn't prompted for when I logged in, I had to hunt down the change password option), I was limited to alphanumerics and 20 characters. Edit: I'll also add that the entire process of setting up an account, getting a license, granting yourself a license, then downloading the software center all just to download the Raspberry Pi image was a lot of roundabout steps for something I'm going to play around with on the weekend and never look at again. I know this is an exercise to gain customers, but still a hassle even for those familiar with the process. Ultimately it reads as if QNX is deathly afraid of giving something away.

> Obtaining the SDP involves the following steps: 1. Register for a myQNX account. 2. Request a free licence. 3. Download QNX Software Centre. 4. Install the SDP on your computer

You lost me at step 1.

Does it come on a 1.44MB floppy (image)?

* http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

* https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo

* https://crackberry.com/heres-how-qnx-looked-1999-running-144...

I think the ship has sailed already. the people I know, who used QNX switched to linux for usability reasons.

You can run linux on many workloads where QNX used to dominate, why bother then.

I need to know if it comes with Photon microGUI! Please, lord, let it happen...

What would be a good hobbyist project to learn QNX?

Cool. If there's Photon, PhAb, and everything looks and feels the same like in QNX 6 I'm in. I couldn't even find the download button though. If registration is mandatory then I'm not interested.

Can we still put QNX on a 1.44M floppy and boot from it?

Will Photon be available as well ?

Been fooled by QNX before, a long time ago, and it cost us a lot. Never again. Go away now QNX, real-time Linux has won.

> Many of you probably used or tinkered with (the very open) QNX back in the day.

Well I didn't and it was not easy to understand what it is from your website. Wikipedia came to my rescue. You may want to consider that.

Oh that's nice. But you know... There's a free (as in freedom) OS called Linux that now is also realtime. QNX is interesting for a few less cases now.

I remember when QNX was going to be the OS for the first post-Commodore Amiga machines. Fun times.

I'm old.

Can one install QNX as the main OS on a desktop? Or can I boot into the QNX desktop from a thumb drive?

You can get 30-day trial, Partner or Academic license. So what's new exactly?

Oh cool, does this also include the unfortunately discontinued desktop version of QNX? I've always wanted to try out a real time OS