Suitability of QNX for small-time tinkerer?

QNX USERS QNX6 - OS
1

I couldn’t quite decide where to post it, but this forum seemed appropriate enough.

I’m interested in taking a POSIX-compliant bare-bones OS and building some of my own functionality on top of it. I really admire QNX for its elegance (being a microkernel RTOS), and I would love to use it for tinkering. Yet, I get the impression sifting through the marketing-speak on qnx.com that it is mostly directed at the enterprise market, and not at a small developer team (consisting of one person to start). Is QNX suitable for small-time tinkering like this? Or should I go with something else like BSD?

So forgive me for asking a few questions, but I absolutely detest QNX.com for not easily giving me the answers to the following questions:

  • Do I need to pay for a development seat to use QNX? How much does this cost?
  • If I understand correctly, I can get the OS for free but not the IDE… how necessary is the IDE for development?
  • If I were to eventually release an embedded project based on this, what is QNX’s licensing like?

I know that I can get some of these answers on the website, but I’d rather hear from the personal experience of others. If you can give any insight at all into any of my questions, it’s much appreciated!

2

No but after 30 days you get the non commercial version which removes some fonctionnality.

The IDE will still work, but you loose all QNX specific stuff. Personnaly event though I have the PE version I don’t use the IDE for development and I’m doing just fine :wink: I haven’t tried the 3.0 version of Eclipse though (that cames with the latest patch)

Run-time licensing fee can get fairly low when volume is involved. I’m not sure but I think a single run-time license is 400$ (you should double check that number)

3

And also bear in mind that although Eclipse will be affected after 30 days, PhAb is not, and of course gcc is not, so you’re still perfectly able to do C/C++ projects with GUIs and stuff.

4

Thanks a lot guys.