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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

The most useful aspect of this, from my perspective: they've finally abolished the non-FOSS license of the old FreeRTOS, and released it under an actually Open Source license, namely MIT. That's one less headache to deal with.

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It's a nice present from Amazon. They should keep doing this, I'd like a MIT licensed QNX next please. God knows they have the money.

GPL would be fine too; I'd just like something that actually qualifies as FOSS, rather than something proprietary.

Baseline FreeRTOS was "GPL" but it had a silly clause prohibiting you from publishing benchmarks.

GPL is also a non-FOSS license. It says it is, but its not.

Can't wait until the GPL is a rarely used license.

It meets the Free Software definition, the OSD, and the DFSG. And even anti-copyleft zealots rarely descend as far as to attempt to claim (falsely) that it isn't a FOSS license, rather than simply complaining that they find it distasteful.

We will be back to the world of public domain and freeware.

Everything will have a light version open source, with the actual goodies only available in the commercial version.

Until then we have the actual goodies only available in the cloud. ;)

Would you care to elaborate on what you believe makes the GPL a non-FOSS license?

It definitely limits the freedom of both the author and user, by restricting the means in which the software may be distributed and the limiting author's right to add additional restrictions (the "all distributions must adhere to these restrictions but can't add more" clause which makes it incompatible with the Apple App Store, for example). It's "Free" in the Free Software Foundation sense but not really in the way some people think of "freedom."

It limits the freedom of the author yes. It severely expands the freedom of the user. That is the whole point of the license, any user has the code available to modify, inspect, or audit himself. I don't see how you think that it limits the freedom of the user too.

I think you don't know what GPL is intended for. It's to give the USER the four basic freedoms, not the dev, not the author, the user.

I tried to research your statement and landed here[0].

I'm somewhat shocked at how many different competing active RTOS's there actually are. There amount of reinventing the wheel must be huge. I mean I know the wikipedia page on Operating Systems lists a lot more.. but the majority of them are long dead.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_real-time_operat...

To be fair, a loop spinning and some malloc / free functions in a library are enough to call something a RTOS.

Yeah but the important question is what about the future investment into these projects? Is there any, or is it just a throwaway thing that Amazon does?

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