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.
For those looking for context around this acqui-hire/stewardship, here's our take from late 2016 when Silicon Labs acquired FreeRTOS competitor Micrium:<p><i>Going forward, we expect to see non-traditional IoT software and infrastructure platform vendors looking closely at the embedded OS space. A compelling OS offering could drive millions of device signups for IoT services platforms, such as AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure, and GE Predix, which derive recurring revenue from services rendered to an installed base of devices. Onboarding an OS offering (or complementing Windows 10 IoT Core with an MCU-focused OS in Microsoft’s case) would allow these players to potentially hook analytics and connectivity services into a portion of the billions of MCUs that are shipped yearly, bumping up services revenue substantially.<p>We see this acquisition as a substantial, missed opportunity for leading MCU vendors, such as Renesas, Microchip/Atmel, and Qualcomm/NXP/Freescale, who we had shortlisted as likely acquirers. Micrium competitors Express Logic and WITTENSTEIN would be rational targets for the next round of RTOS acquisitions.</i><p>We had expected Microsoft to refocus its attention on the MCU space (perhaps with a derivative of WinCE) but they have been more focused on providing runtimes for maker boards and playing catch up with AWS, than building out the bottom end of their OS portfolio. Ditto Google with Android Things.<p>Think this is a great move on Amazon's part providing, but not forcing, an easy on-ramp to AWS for the billions of MCU-powered devices that ship every year.
How do ppl like freertos vs zephyr vs nuttx?<p>Have any real comparisons been done? Both on flexibility (platform support and code portability... I know... Nuttx, POSIX) and performance (interrupts, context switching, etc)<p>I've been looking at zephyr which seems all around better, albeit a bit less mature. I have no hard data though... Hence this question.
>Amazon FreeRTOS ... and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services<p>why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud? Is there any legitimate use case other than reporting data gathered on the customer? Why do have all these gadgets have to snoop on us?
Is this like the sample projects Microsoft makes available for interfacing a variety of development boards to their IoT hub [0] (a few of which use FreeRTOS), or is there something more to it? As usual the AWS docs are rich in inspiring buzz-words and very poor in explaining what the thing actually does. Not that Azure is better in that regard...<p>[0] <a href="https://catalog.azureiotsuite.com/" rel="nofollow">https://catalog.azureiotsuite.com/</a>
The "Get Started For Free" button on the front page has an ominous ring to it. I wonder (hope!) that the free version available from FreeRTOS.org remains available w/out an AWS account.
It might have been nice of them to change the name slightly to avoid confusion with the originating FreeRTOS. <a href="https://www.freertos.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.freertos.org/</a>
Really nice move, hopefully FreeRTOS becomes _the_ OS for those IoT MCUs similar what Linux does to higher end CPUs. It's always amazing to see many great OSS projects are primarily done by an individual while becoming extremely useful for so many.
Side note: I see that some of the graphic assets on the a:freeRTOS site have "Amazon_Treadstone_..." in the names. I imagine "Treadstone" was the internal project name for this initiative? Nice shout out to the Bourne series...