Item — HN Reader

"Access to QNX source code is free, but commercial deployments of QNX Neutrino runtime components still require royalties, and commercial developers will continue to pay for QNX Momentics(R) development seats. However, noncommercial developers, academic faculty members, and qualified partners will be given access to QNX development tools and runtime products at no charge."

1 comments

You are quoting an old press release, not the actual license agreement.

It clearly states that the company made the referenced source code version available for free.

Yes, but it doesn't tell you the precise legal terms and conditions under which they made it available.

Which is the whole point – legally speaking, press releases count for very little, the actual text of the license agreement is far more important.

Are you a lawyer? USA law recognizes promissory estoppel, European laws provide protection by the good faith principle. The press release explicitly states that developers would have access to download "direct from the dev team's subversion repository". The press release also clearly articulates QNX's strategic intent: making source code available to "accelerate innovation," enable developers to "get up to speed more quickly," and allow the community to "learn from QNX's extensive OS experience". The CEO explicitly stated the goal was helping developers "learn the technology". So there is even a strong fair use case for non-commercial educational study.

Are you a lawyer?

"Promissory estoppel" doesn't work that way... it doesn't mean "I don't need to read the legal fine print, I can just go by my interpretation of the press release"

> "it doesn't mean "I don't need to read the legal fine print, I can just go by my interpretation of the press release"

That's not what I said. Anyway, I don't know where you are located, but at least in my country it is no problem to download the code from github for non-commercial educational study, especially given the listed facts. I think we can leave it at that.

In the US, the fact that a given copy is/was available at no-charge is not concomitant with the right to produce and distribute unlimited copies on one's own. Those remain the exclusive rights of the copyright holder.