Microsoft opens sources ThreadX under MIT license Microsoft is open sourcing the realtime operating system that it acquired with Express Logic, donating it to the Eclipse Foundation. The vendor has made its ThreadX RTOS, and the Azure RTOS development suite that includes it, open source. The company has contributed Azure RTOS to the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation, …
"ThreadX is a tested and established product; some parts even have TÜV Functional Safety (FuSa) certification, such as the STM32 version [PDF]. That kind of thing is powerfully attractive to some customers."
Very true.
"As soon as this innocent little OS turned 21 in 2019, Microsoft grabbed it, acquiring ThreadX owners Express Logic and rebranding the poor thing as Azure RTOS, "
And now it's ruined.
As history demonstrates.
:-/
I'm all for Borkzilla-bashing, and I never miss a golden opportunity to do so (or even a copper one), but we might need a little bit more history of this RTOS before blaming Borkzilla for burying it ?
I mean, I'm sure Borkzilla will bury it, but maybe we could give it some time ? It's such a tiny thing, it is possible that might fly under the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish monster that is lurking in Redmond for little while longer ?
Maybe ?
It's all a bit puzzling. TFA seems to imply that ThreadX was something that MS found themselves with, but didn't really need, as a consequence of buying Express Logic. That they might then open source it and shuffle it off to a foundation seems reasonable although very un-Microsoft-like behaviour.
But AFAICS from a quick search ThreadX was EL's only product. In that case what did they think they were acquiring? Was it just the development team? Is there some other product? Was the whole thing just a mistake by the M&A department - you know how it is, you get to the checkout and then find you picked up the box next to the one you intended.
> TFA seems to imply that ThreadX was something that MS found themselves with, but didn't really need, a
Does it? Because I wrote TFA and I did not mean that or think that or intend to imply it. Which doesn't mean I didn't do it by accident, of course.
No, MS wanted it -- I don't know why or what for -- bought the company, but the founder and original programmer up and left and started a rival company which now offers a more sophisticated rival product.
FWIW ThreadX isn't his first; that was Nucleus, some 4Y before ThreadX came out.
Although MS claims 12Bn licences to "just" 3Bn for PX5, the latter sounds quite healthy to me.
If it found that it was a played-out market with no more money to be made, making it FOSS seems like a good plan.
> No, MS wanted it -- I don't know why or what for
MS's behaviour and attitiude towards Linux in recent years has been interesting - on the one hand they've embraced it with WSL and VMs and Azure - and on the other hand they've continued their long-term efforts to lock it out of consumer hardware (Pluton, signing key shenanigans, etc.). It makes me wonder if they have designs on Windows becoming an underpinning BIOS-like layer which Linux runs on top of - in which case controlling the RTOS used for IME makes perfect sense. If that RTOS is no longer used by IME and they have no further use for it, then they might as well toss it into the copilot code grinder.
I've followed Neucleus, ThreadX and Lamie for years and the MS purchased curious as to their motivation. They're moves have generally been market blocking protectionism at its best.
I had not noticed that ThreadX was in all the rPi OS images upto v4 and seeing how Microsoft has seen the rPi as a thorn in its side for years it might have been all it took to get the purchase approved.
Think about it, Micrsoft purchased Express Logic/ThreadX in April 2019 and the Raspberry Pi foundation released the Raspberry Pi v4B+ in June of 2019.
I don't know if Microsoft has insiders in the Raspberry Pi Foundation but it could be someone didn't do the work needed to know there'd soon be no way to track rPi sales numbers and licensing fees but for the older versions. And worst, no strings attached to the new products.
All speculation on my part based on the history of Microsoft's attacks on products which moved developers to the Linux APIs as opposed to being trapped in Micrsoft Windows APIs.
Either way, ThreadX appears useless to them and Bill Lamie walked away smiling and continues geeking out on his next embedded RTOS project.
I mean, I'm sure Borkzilla will bury it,
They've just put the code on github, and according to the Eclipse foundation will subsequently be re-licencing it under the MIT licence.
The current licence forbids you from creating a competing product, which you will be allowed to do once it's re-licenced.
That doesn't seem like burying it?
One: MS are trying to hit out at Zephyr, which is a very fast-growing in popularity RTOS run by the Linux Foundation with excellent open source governance..
Two: MS are stopping active development of ThreadX, they are hoping that someone will maintain it for free, and they will not be continuing with its safety certification
Both may be true, but if Two is true then anyone who paid for safety artifacts in the past is a bit shafted.
Just a quick FYI. The version of ThreadX used on the Raspberry Pi is from before the MS buyout, on an indefinite licence AIUI. Although the conspiracy theory nutters will claim otherwise, MS have never had any influence on the RTOS used on the Pi.
I cannot see that MS making it MIT will have any effect on the OSS or not nature of the Pi firmware.
I don't know if you are the same AC who posted about ThreadX on the Pi last time. I linked to that comment in TFA but just in case, this one:
https://forums.theregister.com/post/reply/4735439
Any road up. I very definitely didn't mean to imply anything nefarious, or that MS had any influence over the Pi or anything of the kind.
But I am not in favour of proprietary BLOBs in general and firmware that isn't really firm. I've written about the problem before, here:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/01/proprietary_firmware_blobs/
If the upstream OS is now FOSS then all the Pi Foundation needs to do is get permission from Broadcom and it could release the source code to the Pi's version. There are a lot of people who'd like that and there have been 2 efforts to create such a thing from scratch already. One is linked in the article and the other is a fork:
https://github.com/librerpi/
If nothing else, now that newer versions are available as FOSS it's possible that the Pi 1/2/3/4 firmware could be updated, maybe bringing new features. Or other companies could write their own, or port existing firmware such as coreboot.
I don't see any vast potential but more to the point I don't see any real downside to this.
I agree with Liam on this point. There's nothing nefarious with their open sourcing of things. Microsoft has simply found a better grift which helps IT enthusiasts/hobbyists with a passion for technology while slowly, carefully pickpocketing all the for-profit corporates. As long as they can keep making money selling repackaged "cloud services" while convincing the folks who are only in it for the money that the best path to riches is in the cloud (their cloud) then Microsoft will keep on contributing to FOSS to keep us nerds happy as it saves Microsoft a lot of staffing costs long-term if they get passionate hobbyists wanting to help them.
Look at the raw numbers and you'll see what I mean: Instead of a £399 (inc. VAT.) office licence with 10 years of updates which allowed for one desktop and one portable device (£2.66/user/month in real business terms) they now charge £8.60/user/month (ex. VAT) for the same thing as a "cloud service" despite it being a locally installed app with the risk of continual price increases every year. To make things seem like a better deal, if you'd only pay £10.30/user/month, you could also get good old-fashioned email, I-cant-believe-its-not-Skype and 1TB of unencrypted cloud storage for "backing up" your desktop and documents to. Then when you realise you need to pass basic security compliance because you're a business, they'll be there for you to crank that price up to £18.10/user/month so you can get conditional access controls and escrowed certificate-based encryption (Azure Information Protection) akin to what an on-premises system would offer you anyway (and usually at no extra cost).
Of course, Microsoft will tell businesspeople that they will save money needing fewer techies as they then don't need a Microsoft Exchange expert nor a bunch of MCSEs looking after a fleet of Windows Server instances with myriad roles spread across them. But what they don't tell them is that they still need people with foundational knowledge/experience in the real world to middleman support tickets when things go wrong with their services anyway, and that inducing a brain drain will make the smaller pile of techies who don't exit to specialise in other areas far more expensive to employ, despite them doing less.
As of 2023, to ensure people do buy in on their cloud, Microsoft upped the cost of boxed Office to £429, slashed support to 5 years and took away the portable PC allowance (just 1 PC for equivalent of £7/device/month ex.VAT), they cranked up the cost of Exchange on-prem licencing across the board, and started introducing new Windows licences which can only (legally) be used within Azure (e.g. fully RDS-capable versions of Windows 10/11) to try and drive people away from maintaining their own infrastructure.
...and that's only one teeny-tiny aspect of Microsoft's business which has seen significantly larger returns in an incredibly short period of time thanks to some very shrewd choices.
Not generally into replying to anonymous posts but since the author did here goes.
Microsoft has always gone to great lengths to find and keep ways of measuring market penetration of threats to its market share. It's been said many many times that Microsoft is a marketing company first and a technology company second. They have not been able to get Windows on the Raspberry Pi in any way such that it affects the flow of Windows users and developers to learning Linux because of some Raspberry Pi project or interest(robotics and AI are things these days). So it would not surprise me if there weren't mechanisms in the purchase of Express Logic which would have given Microsoft bean counters a stream of numbers showing monthly sales of Raspberry Pis.
I'm reminded of a lawsuit Microsoft was in years ago where a company had originally licensed some small bit of software from Microsoft, it became obsolete but Microsoft refused to release the vendor from the per-unit license no matter if they shipped with or without the software. The income from the license was miniscule but it's real value was knowing exactly the sales numbers of the product tied to the license.
Or they just wanted Lamie or both. But somehow his lawyers were some of the only ones in history to have outsmarted Microsoft lawyers and the contract's fine print had the escape clause they missed.
Anyone tied to the purchase missing from Microsoft's employee roster at the time of Mr Lamie's departure?
is good. It should mean that there are no gotchas in the firmware, no hidden traps to catch you unawares, no IOT-Call-Home to catch you out, no unexplained behaviour from what is alleged to be single-purpose hardware, etc.
I look forward to seeing what can be done with it. I commend Microsoft for doing this. It's a good move.
The Microsoft documentation claims MISRA Compliance.
Does anyone know where the artefacts can be found to support that claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C
"While there exist many software tools that claim to check code for "MISRA conformance", there is no MISRA certification process."
It seems all they need to do is to claim it's MISRA-compliant, and wait for someone to come along and challenge that claim. A bit like the validity of a US patent.
MISRA says that any of its rules can be ignored with a statement to say that this rule has been ignored for whatever ${reason}. There is no such thing as formal MISRA compliance, because there are few people who can say if all [${reason}] are reasonable.
It's easy to make a MISRA-compliant RTOS, as long as you restrict it to a MISRA-ble set of features. For any extra features, you need to write a ${reason} to ignore their rules.
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