ESC, San Jose, CA — (press release excerpt) — The moment eagerly awaited by over 45,000 pre-registered developers and enthusiasts is here: This morning, QNX Software Systems officially released the QNX realtime platform on get.qnx.com. Starting immediately, anyone can download the entire platform for evaluation, prototyping, personal use, or other non-commercial purposes — at no charge.

“Today marks two firsts in the embedded industry,” said QNX CTO Dan Dodge. “To begin with, the QNX realtime platform is the only solution to combine the reliability, speed, and small footprint of an RTOS with all the benefits of a platform OS: low cost of entry, friendly self-hosted environment, plus tools and POSIX APIs familiar to thousands of developers. “Second, QNX is the only major OS vendor to give away its entire technology suite free to anyone who wants it for non-commercial purposes. The new Get QNX program will make it much easier for developers to join the fast-growing QNX community, and much easier for our OEM customers to leverage a large base of knowledgeable developers.”

The free download is a complete, fully functional distribution of the QNX realtime platform. It includes the full suite of QNX OS modules (microkernel, file systems, networking, etc.), a GNU toolchain, a code-generating application builder, the Photon microGUI windowing system, Internet and multimedia applications, hundreds of utilities, plus source code for many applications, drivers, and libraries.

The free download also includes a variety of software from third-party vendors, including: Glide 3D API from 3dfx, scalable fonts from Bitstream, ICA client from Citrix, RenderWare 3D toolkit from Criterion, Quake III Arena demo from id Software, Flash Player from Macromedia, and RealPlayer from RealNetworks.

The noncommercial version of the QNX realtime platform is also available on CD, for US $29.95.

 
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