QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

It's not the first time the embedded microkernel OS has changed its terms

Version 8 of the Software Development Platform for the QNX microkernel real-time OS has gone freeware – but there are some strings attached.

With a new outreach initiative it calls QNX Everywhere, Canadian RTOS vendor Blackberry is trying to drum up more interest in its lightweight, microkernel-based, Unix-like real-time OS. There was already a free 30-day evaluation version, but now an unlimited edition is available – so long as it's for evaluation and non-commercial use. There's a Raspberry Pi version, and the company is also offering demo source code on GitLab.

QNX is venerable code now. It dates back to the 1980s, and it's probably the most proven genuine microkernel OS in the business. We stress genuine microkernel, because microkernels were very trendy in the late 20th century for a while and as a result everyone and their dog claimed their OSes were microkernels.

Microsoft bruited it about the massively monolithic Windows NT kernel. Carnegie-Mellon's Mach broadly is, and alongside several long-dead proprietary OSes such as Tru64 and OSF/1, Mach lies deep underneath macOS – but that has a big in-kernel "Unix server" that rather nixes the "micro" part. The FOSS Minix version 3 definitely counts, but despite being shipped inside millions of Intel Core microprocessors' management engines, Minix 3 remains somewhat incomplete, and since creator Andy Tanenbaum has retired, it looks likely to stay that way.

This is not the first time that QNX's owners have made it free to use, though, and some battle-scarred industry veterans are a little wary, as the Hacker News comments attest. It first came to many people's attention in 1997 when Amiga Inc chose QNX as the basis of the next-gen Amiga.

That didn't happen, but in 1999, QNX showed what it could do by releasing the amazing single-floppy demo disk. Astonishingly even at the time, this fitted the OS, its GUI, a web browser, and a TCP/IP stack onto one bootable 1.4 MB floppy diskette. You can see how it looked and still get some extensions even now.

For a while it was one of several competing x86 Unix-like OSes, and it gradually picked up ports of many popular FOSS tools, even including Mozilla Firefox. The company was acquired by Harman in 2004. A few years later, in 2007, it published the source code of the OS, although it wasn't really open source. You could look, but not do anything much with it. A few years later, Blackberry maker RIM acquired its Canadian neighbor and the source code was quickly withdrawn again. (Copies, of course, can still be found.) Former owner Harman was later acquired by Samsung.

Still, this is an encouraging move. The embedded and real-time OS space has changed quite quickly in recent years, which has prompted some significant shifts. Around this time last year, Microsoft open sourced its ThreadX RTOS, as used in the Raspberry Pi's firmware. As we noted when version 6.11 of the kernel appeared, the real-time patches for a pre-emptive version of Linux itself were merged and should appear with kernel version 6.12 in the very near future.

Although Linux is very big by RTOS standards, it's free, everyone knows it, and almost everyone supports it, which makes it a contender even against smaller, lighter, faster OSes – such as QNX. This may be a motivating factor for the Blackberry subsidiary to make efforts to attract fresh interest to its contender.

We've contacted the company and requested an evaluation license, so we hope to have a look at the latest version in the near future. ®