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

(blackberry.qnx.com)

Comments

Animats 7 November 2024
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...

altairprime 7 November 2024
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.

parl_match 7 November 2024
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.

vundercind 7 November 2024
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.

johndoe0815 7 November 2024
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

AceJohnny2 7 November 2024
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 ^^;

nrclark 7 November 2024
@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.

Baeocystin 7 November 2024
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.

tlack 7 November 2024
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.
xvilka 8 November 2024
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...

bexsella 7 November 2024
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.
foolswisdom 7 November 2024
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

brynet 7 November 2024
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.

graymatters 8 November 2024
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.
supermatt 8 November 2024
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...

ksaj 7 November 2024
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!

fauria 7 November 2024
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

GuestFAUniverse 7 November 2024
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.

farseer 7 November 2024
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.
rw_grim 7 November 2024
> 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...

justin66 7 November 2024
@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...

armaautomotive 7 November 2024
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.
rbanffy 7 November 2024
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.

MichaelZuo 7 November 2024
For attracting more developers can you compile a comarison table with the benefits of QNX versus competitors?

The existing information out there is of questionable reliability and probably out of date too...

VoxPelli 7 November 2024
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...

peppertree 7 November 2024
20 years too late but ok.
elahav 8 November 2024
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.
Retr0id 7 November 2024
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.
baq 7 November 2024
I don't want to create an account just to know if it'll work on a pi zero w, will it?
rustcleaner 8 November 2024
GPL it or we pretend nothing has changed at all. No more indian-giving, put up or buy an ad!
jsheard 7 November 2024
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.
initramfs 7 November 2024
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)

Beijinger 8 November 2024
jauntywundrkind 7 November 2024
I wonder how much DBus (the Inter-Process-Communication (IPC) standard Linux desktops have been based around) is baked into QNX & instrumental to it! Maybe I can find out now?

https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf or https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/vehicle-cybersecurity-the-...

That was such a time. It's sad that it was a security panic, to me, because there was incredible promise there... All of the cars infotainment, windows, interior lighting, HVAC, all these things are just DBus services hosted on QNX? And I can just connect to my car & modify them, in some cases even over the air? QNX & DBus could have been a huge selling point, could have been such an awesome way to debundle the car from its infotainment. If only.

Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place. Seeing how monolithic versus networked QNX is in general would be fascinating; is there one or two QNX hosts & lots of devices, or so the story more distributed that that?

masijo 7 November 2024
I need to know if it comes with Photon microGUI! Please, lord, let it happen...
java-man 7 November 2024
This is a good move!

In my opinion, any platform should be available for free for any non-commercial purpose. This is how people get started, and this is how the platform proliferates.

I might even suggest going a bit further: provide some limited support for non-commercial users, for example, make it super-easy to file a bug.

But otherwise, it's a win-win for both the free tier (students, hobbyists) and the corporate.

michrassena 8 November 2024
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.
steve_adams_86 7 November 2024
What would be a good hobbyist project to learn QNX?
mech422 7 November 2024
Will Photon be available as well ?
qwerty456127 8 November 2024
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.
SuperNinKenDo 7 November 2024
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me 3 or more times, and I'd need to get my head checked for possible brain damage.

I feel bad for saying this because probably someone out there spent energy building political capital in the organisation and has stuck their neck out a bit to make this happen, but yeah, I'll have a look and a play, but no way would I invest serious energy into the QNX platform with these current terms.

Not that you're missing anything. I'm no wizard.

beardyw 7 November 2024
> 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.

nbittich 8 November 2024
> 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.

wrd83 8 November 2024
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.

sgt 8 November 2024
Can we still put QNX on a 1.44M floppy and boot from it?
marcodiego 8 November 2024
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.
wkat4242 7 November 2024
Oh cool, does this also include the unfortunately discontinued desktop version of QNX? I've always wanted to try out a real time OS
RachelF 8 November 2024
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.
sriram_sun 7 November 2024
Is there an eBPF equivalent for QNX? Also, with the real-time linux patch (which has been mainlined now), I'm able to run C++ ROS2 control loops @ 1ms down to even 250us on commodity off the shelf i3 and i5 hardware with dedicated cores.

I've worked on vxWorks, QNX and Linux and I found the pace of development using Linux the fastest.

mikercampbell 7 November 2024
With all due respect, I’ve never spent so long clicking through a website trying to figure out what it actually was.

What is QNX haha

billpg 8 November 2024
I remember when QNX was going to be the OS for the first post-Commodore Amiga machines. Fun times.

I'm old.

1vuio0pswjnm7 8 November 2024
"... 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.

hacknews20 7 November 2024
Great. Long over due, maybe too late.
mcmisieck 8 November 2024
You can get 30-day trial, Partner or Academic license. So what's new exactly?
kmbfjr 7 November 2024
What I need to know is, does it come with Solitaire using the “Giants of Computing” card deck?

Because if it does, that is worth it right there.

We ran QNX for ASI statistical multiplexing in TV. I would always fire up a game while waiting for logs.

faragon 8 November 2024
Working with QNX today is like working with 25 year old software: tiny community, few examples, lots of issues for which you end doing avoidance workarounds, etc.

I would have more interest on it if being open source.

SushiHippie 7 November 2024
My experience looking at the page as someone who has never heard of QNX:

First there is so much text that wants to tell me how great this software/tooling/resources is, without telling me what exactly it is.

As I still wanted to know what it is, after reading your comment here†, I clicked on the front page https://blackberry.qnx.com/en which has a concise introduction

"Real-Time OS and Software for Embedded Systems

Launch your critical embedded systems faster with our commercial RTOS, hypervisor, development tools and services."

An RTOS for embedded system, aha! That would be valuable information on the QNX Everywhere page. (Real-Time OS / RTOS isn't mentioned once)

Then I found the resources section nearly at the bottom, which has quick start guide, where I can see what I will get when I sign up for a free license and that would be exactly what I (as someone who has no clue what to expect from QNX) would want to see at the top, after a short introduction to what it is and why I want to try it out.

Maybe this page is more intended for people who are already aware of QNX, but if you intend to "catch" new people I really would recommend you to reorder/simplify this page, by putting relevant information (like a short introduction, why I would want to try it and a quick start guide) at the top instead of a wall of marketing text.

† this comment was first under a comment from the author, which now got moved to the HN post text

idatum 7 November 2024
I recall running QNX on my iPAQ handheld, sometime in the late 2000s. It was pre-iPhone, so seeing a Unix-like O/S on a handheld device back then was quite a treat.
BenFranklin100 8 November 2024
John, Would it be possible to get this installed on a BlackBerry Passport or Q10. The passport is my favorite phone of all time.
7thaccount 8 November 2024
Can one install QNX as the main OS on a desktop? Or can I boot into the QNX desktop from a thumb drive?
j1mmie 7 November 2024
I'm interested in building a Unity game for Raspberry Pi 4. Does QNX have good graphics support for RPi currently?
ConanRus 7 November 2024
why didn't they just open it for all with a proper license? as soon as you're move toward a commercial product with qnx you're immediately own them money. and no money with linux. who will us qnx on these terms?
znpy 8 November 2024
Hey, what iPIs are supported ?

I have an old first-gen raspberry pi, would QNX work on that ?

CyberDildonics 7 November 2024
Reinventing QNX will always be seen as cutting edge.
upintord 7 November 2024
Any tips on loading onto a Kyocera duraforce? tia
consultSKI 8 November 2024
Awesome! I signed up for the BlackBerry PlayBook dev initiative at SXSW in 2012 and found the device and QNX to be amazing. It supported a bluetooth mouse YEARS before the iPad! But BB failed to capitalize and yet another great product failed to make it into the mainstream.

Looking forward to it! Espcially now that you guys are "inside" several EVs if the rumors are true. Sign me up!

bastloing 8 November 2024
This would have been good 20 years ago, but now, nope.
Havoc 8 November 2024
For the love of god put what the thing is into the first sentence. Still have no idea wth qnx is
wooptoo 8 November 2024
QNX is now largely irrelevant with the merging of the PREEMPT_RT patches in the mainline Linux kernel, starting with v6.12 which comes out in a week or two.
lcooper 8 November 2024
You should have done this 20y ago