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Comment by simcop2387 | Hacker News Reader

It might have been nice of them to change the name slightly to avoid confusion with the originating FreeRTOS. https://www.freertos.org/

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At the top of the page you linked to, I see this message:

> The FreeRTOS kernel is now an AWS open source project, and these pages are being updated accordingly.

Given that, the distinction probably isn't super important.

Good catch I didn't see that announcement there. That does change things

It seems it is exactly freeRTOS, but with some additional drivers and libs so not changing the name seems to be a good decision I think. I am wondering however if by using this os, the dev is obliged to use aws services. Isn't this more of a limitation than a benefit?

According to [1] "FreeRTOS remains open source, with no commitments. [...] FreeRTOS users are not required to be AWS customers in any way."

Most likely Amazon's motivation is that they can make sure FreeRTOS makes using Amazon's services very easy; there are some IoT offerings that can't connect to Amazon's services, (or at least can't connect easily) [2]

By making sure FreeRTOS can easily pull in the right libraries, they can make it easier for people to connect devices to AWS without compromising on secure encryption.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-... [2] Last time I checked, Amazons MQTT service required TLS1.2 and an esp8266 only supported TLS1.1

The latest axtls port for esp8266 supports TLS 1.2.

That's a fair question. There definitely are people not wanting the additional stuff from Amazon.

For example, probably most people using FreeRTOS thus far were using it for ordinary MCU stuff like listening for button presses and blinking LEDs without even involving a wifi transceiver at any point.

i would assume it’s like amazon linux; rhel with extras to make amazonization easy... but freertos rather than rhel

>Amazon FreeRTOS is based on the FreeRTOS kernel, a popular open source operating system for microcontrollers, and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to more powerful edge devices running AWS Greengrass.

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