Tony Smith, of The Register, reports that RTOS vendor QNX Software Systems is about to unveil a major strategy shift — one that strongly indicates the enormous impact Linux and open-source software are having on the embedded software market . . .

“In a bid to boost its profile in the emerging 'e-device' arena, real-time operating system supplier QNX is going open source — sort of.”

“QNX calls its take on open source, 'accessible source'. As yet, the precise terms of the licensing agreement have yet to be finalised, but the scheme broadly mirrors Sun's Java Public Source licence. So, source code will be made available to anyone who wants it, and developers will only pay if they take products based on QNX technology to market.”

“Again, that's sort of. Not all of QNX's Neutrino OS will be opened up in this way. Neutrino's boot code, Web browser, media players, driver toolkits, and other OS utilities like the Photon microGUI will be opened for public inspection, but its microkernel and core OS modules will remain proprietary.”

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