Slashdot Mirror
QNX Now Free For Non-Commercial use
Glytch writes: "QNX is now offering the QNX Realtime Platform operating system for free for non-commercial use for x86 machines. Available installation methods include a Windows 9x executable, an ISO image, and a QNX4 installation archive. Pretty much like Be, Inc. did with BeOS 5." And like Sun has with Solaris, to boot. Would it be that surprising to find Windows soon available "for non-commericial use"?
"Would it be that surprising to find Windows soon available "for non-commericial use"? "
Yes. Unlike Be, Sun and QNX, Microsoft makes quite a bit of money selling software like Windows to home users for "non-commercial" use. Mom and Dad aren't going to run solaris, but they'll probably run win98. Don't forget, money=god
A point worth noting is that QNX's ability to do hard realtime processing makes it handy in other applications as well. I worked with it for years, almost always in a 'soft' realtime capacity. It was beautifully efficient and robust.
When my company was marketing-department-strong-armed into supporting Windows NT, the sorry developers who moved to that platform spent half their time trying to work around the fact that pressing and holding the mouse button causes the CPU meter to jump to 100%. I kid you not.
The other half the time seemed to be spent trying to get device drivers to work, which was particularly laughable because 'better 3rd party device support' was one of the major reasons we made the switch.
So with both halves of their time used trying to do things QNX gave them for free, when did they get to advance the actual applications? Well, that was in the time known as 'overtime'.
It stressed me out too much to watch. I quit instead.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
Is it a Desktop OS?
A server OS?
Is anyone actually using QNX ?
What can it do, that Linux and Be can't?
No, it's not a Desktop OS.
No, it's not a server OS.
Yes, people use it, in an embedded environment.
It can do hard realtime processing.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not quite. You need deterministic latency. You have to ensure that hard deadlines are met. If a process MUST complete before 50ms, and you don't meet that deadline, then you have a problem. That's what a hard Real-Time system is. Just changing the schedule won't cut it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Isn't Windows already free for non-commercial use? I mean... effectively, not legally.
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The one announced as being released free at Slashdot on the 26th of April 2000?
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Get QNX For Free
Posted by jamie on Wednesday April 26, @08:59AM
from the no-PIII-required dept.
TomRitchford writes: "QNX is about to start distributing their real-time OS for free downloads for non-commercial use at get.qnx.com. Right now it's 'Real Soon Now,' but you can sign up and they'll send a free CD to the first 5000 to request it." The operating system's concepts will look familiar to anyone who knows unix, but its design makes it better for older (Intel-compatible) CPUs, and situations where stability and predictability are more important than unix's cornucopia of applications and features.
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Then it's actull avalablity annouced on September the 25th 2000?
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QNX Realtime Platform Now Available
Posted by Hemos on Monday September 25, @05:30PM
from the yet-another-os dept.
A reader writes "The QNX development platform is now available. It's available in three versions: the Windows-based self-extracting installer, the ISO image and the QNX4 install archive" You can also get it from QNX's site itself.
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This posting today is a little redundant... I've seen on my IRC server of choice a #qnx channel thrive then die in the time between the launch story post and this one.
The QNX RtP free annoucment was pretty big news. It's a bit dodgy that this managed to slip though the net as news again.
Better ask and be ignorant no more, than keep quiet and remain as one.
Fundamentally every OS is a real-time OS. This means, they exist and run in synch with real time where humans exist. The OSes are divided to two categories:
-Hard RT
-Soft RT
The difference is, in soft RT systems timing is not of great importance. If a process finishes 200us later than it should have, it is no end of the world. In hard RT systems it could be...
As soft RT systems are all aound us, we do not usually call them as such, but call just the hard RT systems as RT systems.
Let's have a few examples of soft/hard operations:
A DSP point of view:-Print job is sent to the fancy HP Laserjet. In this case, it does not matter if you got all the 12 pages in one minute or 2 minutes. Sure, one is irriated if printing takes time, but no harm occurs for a slight delay.
-AH-64D is cruising across hostile territory and detects an incoming laser targeting beam. The copper takes immediate evasive action! Now, if the flight computer does not finish evaluating threat analyisis in, say, 500ms, the SAM might very well hit the copter and kill the crew. Now, it really matters if the system can finish its job in set limit.
-A industrial assembly robot is welding two pieces of steel together. Two other robots pass the parts to the welder one. If one of these robots misses its schedule, the welder will weld an invalid part: maybe there are no parts when welding happens, or maybe only one part is welded. One can clearly see, there is a possibility of great damage here if the schedules are missed, so this calls for a hard RT system.
-In a real-time DSP process, the analyzed (input) and/or generated (output) samples (whether they are grouped together in large segments or processed individually) can be processed (or generated) continuously in the time it takes to input and/or output the same set of samples independent of the processing delay.
There is a nice FAQ about the RT systems, available at http://www.landfield.com/faqs/realtime-computing/f aq/ for the goatsex paranoids (including me.)
-P--
I hate people who quote
You see, if they started giving windows away for free then their revenue graph would show a very steep decline. This screems "Get the hell away!" to shareholders and investors which decreases the value of their shares which puts the company in a pretty terrible position.
It's probably a strategy that they've considered but because of what I stated above, it's impossible without generating an alternative source of revenue that's as large (or preferrably larger) than the OEM sales before they start giving windows away for free.
You may say that .NET is probably this strategy but I would disagree there as well. .NET (Whistler specifically) is the strategy that they are using to get into the ASP market. See, if microsoft just left the desktop OS market to go into the ASP market then the above would also happen (no more OEM sales->decline in revenue->share holders screem->company in deep shit). This is where whistler comes in. They have to charge money for whistler so they don't lose the revenue from pc sales while they switch to an ASP model. It's a pretty smart move business-wise.
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Garett
QNX is a light and mean OS with many applications. Have you ever tried to run 24 10MB images per second through an image capture card and straight onto a network? You better believe that QNX is one of the only OS's that will handle that. It's quasi-realtime nature makes it ideal. The kind folks at QNX will basically roll your own custom distro for a specific job.
My second point was that your grammar sucks. Please try to proofread your comments before you submit them in the future. It will make /. a nicer place.
Keeping
"Would it be that surprising to find Windows soon available 'for non-commericial use'? "
Yes. Not only surprising, but profoundly shocking. Deeply disturbing. It would destroy my already tenuous grasp on reality.
Especially unlikely considering what they've said recently about the GPL.
QNX is a great OS. We've been working with it in our computer labs trying to come up with a good web browser that doesn't have to use a HD (we are using it from the CDROM). For those of you who haven't seen QNX, they have a complete OS + web browser running on a 3.5" floppy. Pretty impressive, IMHO.
It is a nice OS, also, because it doesn't create extra partitions. There is a large file that it stores under a directory (the image file) which is loaded on bootup. So if you ever decide to 'uninstall', I believe you can just delete the file.
Great OS. I hope to see more for it and its good to see that it is free now.
-Frijoles-
Would it be that surprising to find Windows soon available "for non-commericial use"?
Yes. It'd be an incredible event. MS has used its OS as its main tool for leverage over OEMs, hardware manufacturers, etc. The second it becomes free for 'home' use (or whatever), OEMs don't have to ship it anymore, which means they save a bundle of cash, and aren't tied into restrictive trade agreements with MS anymore, since everybody can just pick up a free copy of Windows for non-commercial use. Heck, I bet you could probably get free copies of Windows for just shipping costs from everywhere. Giving up its main means of leverage would be ludicrous.
And as an aside: The REAL reason why BeOS, QNX and others are free for 'personal' use is simple. They are the hunters, going after the market leader. Not necessarily everywhere, but certainly in certain niches. Not everybody wants to use BeOS, but for people who deal with media a lot (MacOS, IRIX?), it could be an alternative. And look, those people can run BeOS for free, at home. Wonder if they'll want to use it at work as well?
Solaris is another thing entirely. Yeah, it's semi-free (I think Sun still charge $50 or so for 'media costs'), but the reason why Solaris was made free for personal use is because Linux is destroying any kind of 'personal/home' UNIX base there ever was. If you want UNIX at home or just to try for a small, non-commercial server.. hell, xyzBSD or Linux are ideal choices. If Solaris is free, though, some people might reconsider. And if you need the much-hyped 'enterprise OS features' that both Sun and MS claim Linux/xyzBSD don't have, Solaris has a 'big-league' image.
In the end, it's pretty simple: why would they want to give it away? BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE. VERY few people were actually BUYING BeOS or QNX for personal (ie non-commercial) use. Solaris was a different thing in academia etc. but the big money is with servicing contracts and hardware anyway. QNX is a purely professional embedded platform so far. So NOBODY has anything to lose from making it free for non-commercial use - rather the opposite: they entice people to try it, and ideally to use it in professional situations, where Sun/QNX/Be *will* get money.
Now, look at it again: Why would MS ever dream of making one of its cash cows free? They only have to lose. They've been able to *raise* the price of their software - over the last 10 years, the only part of a computer that's become more expensive is the OS, namely WindowsXYZ!
Windows for free. Good lord. What next, RMS agrees to work for the MS PR division?
Alex T-B
St Andrews
I remember BeDope posted the following back when BeOS went free. I thought you might like to read it...
Folks were arguing about whether "free like beer" was any good compared to "free like speech". Be Dope researches composed a scientific test to answer this question once and for all.
Be Dope CTO, Dr. Doxie, took her staff to a local computer show armed with several kegs of beer and hundreds of copies of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right to free speech.
The results were surprising and conclusive.
"Fully 99 out of every hundred people chose Free Beer over Free Speech," reported Doxie. "In some cases, the subject would begin stressing the importance of free speech, but all the while they'd be eyeing the free beer. In most cases, the free beer won in the end."
"We spent many hours in the lab testing both beer and speech," said Sakoman. "Those who consumed free beer reported feeling satisfied and sometimes 'buzzed'," said Be, Inc. COO Steve Sakoman. "Those speaking free afterwards rarely reported any benefits, and in fact would sometimes complain of a dry mouth or scratchy throat."
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This message brought to you by Colin Davis
Colin Davis
Sun now offers compressed ISO images for download, as mentioned in another comment. No charge, just a simple license.
From The official FAQ:
No, it's not GPL, but not everything of value in the world is released under the GPL. Get over it.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
QNX is a real-time OS, based on a microkernel. It's useful in situations with hard RT requirements... where something like Linux or BSD currently would be inappropriate (Unix is not RealTime).
Hard RealTime systems are extremely difficult to write, there's probably no way in hell that QNX will be GPL'ed, there's a hell of a lot of investment there. This same point came up in "GPL 3.0 Concerns in Embedded World".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If Windows ever goes free for home, or any other type of, use, I am sure their will be a great outcry on Slashdot and maybe in the justice department about how Micro$oft is destroying competition by giving its product away for free.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
When I first read this, I thought, as probably most of you did: "Yeah, right! Forget it!". But then, I gave it a second thought: after all, Microsoft already does provide some free software, IE being an oustanding example.
The question is: why is IE free? I guess the answer has something to do with crushing a certain competitor, combined with the fact that Microsoft can afford to provide IE free of charges.
Now, what if the competition on the OS front starts to threaten Microsoft? We have seen that recently, they have changed their stance towards Linux, considering it a serious threat...
So, given the above, and considering that Microsoft would still make money on commercial licences, and of course on their other products, does the "free for non-commercial use" Windows idea still sound stupid?
Another question I'd like to raise: if Windows does become free (let's say for any use, to broaden the topic), what would the consequences be?
I code, therefore I am.