Richard Barry, founder of FreeRTOS, has joined AWS as a principal engineer, and will continue to support Amazon FreeRTOS. WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS) will continue to support and develop OPENRTOS and SAFERTOS, commercial implementations of FreeRTOS for projects that require certification or support.

Richard released FreeRTOS in 2003, and had been working on FreeRTOS in partnership with WHIS since 2006, when they started to provide commercial support for it.

I do hope they'll keep maintaining it - I've been working with an ESP32 lately and the stuff Espressif has been able to build using FreeRTOS as a base is nothing short of incredible. $7 for wifi and bluetooth on a development board.

Agreed, the esp32 has blown me away with what it can do for a few dollars. I have a custom board with the esp-wroom-32 and the temperature sensor I'm using is more expensive than the esp32 module!

The ESP32 is just like a tiny Amstrad PCW 1512, with dual core and extra network support.

Which for anyone that used a PCW, means it can do a lot.

Additionally they are adding in things like native drivers for WiFi, BLE, and signed updates. AWS Version will be v5.0.

I'm a bit confused. I guessed he was selling it with Wittenstein given (a) they have commercial licenses for the same source and (b) one of their docs said he helped set up the High Integrity Division of Wittenstein. That link makes me wonder what impact they had at all on FreeRTOS.

https://www.highintegritysystems.com/openrtos/

Note that I don't follow FreeRTOS's closely. I just discovered it searching for RTOS's with Wittenstein looking at who was doing safety-certified RTOS's. At least back then, it was neat to think someone's RTOS project was getting adoption in the commercial sector with some money going back to them. Now I wonder...

This certainly seems to make OPENRTOS^R redundant

    The additional value offered by OPENRTOS is as a ‘commercial and legal wrapper’ for FreeRTOS users.

The commercial variant still offers indemnification, warranty, and support; all of these are at the least mandated by many large organizations' acquisition policies.

Ok, now I get it. The core of the announcement is that they're doing with FreeRTOS what Apple did with CUPS, basically (plus the MIT relicensing). On the one hand, it feels like a power grab; on the other hand, one can only hope that it might bring some sorely needed standards of decency in the IoT world...

I hope so too. At least FreeRTOS has tons of track time on it (I've been using it for years). Whence Google Brillo (or whatever it's called this year?)