‘Tis Open Season?

[Microsoft opens up test suites and development assistance for Moonlight][1], AMD opens up the specifications for their ATI GPUs and now QNX have announced they will open up the code for their Neutrino operating system! Has the world gone open crazy?

Unfortunately the QNX source code is not really "open" in the sense that it's open source – it's still being released under a commercial license, it's just that the code can now be used for education and non-commercial projects. Apparently this means that people can make "distributions" and port the code to different architectures but I fail to see why anyone would do this if the system is not actually open source. Really it'd just be giving code to QNX while only receiving small benefits in compensation.

Oh well, the AMD announcement is still extremely exciting. Work on open source ATI drivers should now proceed at a greatly accelerated pace and may soon outstrip nVidia as the GPU of choice on open source operating systems.

[1]: http://www.chnorton.com.au/2007/09/06/silverlight-10-and-moonlight/