The FreeRTOS kernel was originally developed by Richard Barry around 2003, and was later developed and maintained by Richard's company, Real Time Engineers Ltd. FreeRTOS was a runaway success, and in 2017 Real Time Engineers Ltd. passed stewardship of the FreeRTOS project to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Richard continues to work on FreeRTOS as part of an AWS team.
Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost cloud infrastructure platform that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world. In 2015 AWS added specific Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, and now offers Amazon FreeRTOS to help users securely connect their MCU devices to the cloud.
Amazon FreeRTOS uses the FreeRTOS kernel, and adds libraries that make small low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. You do not need to be an AWS customer to use Amazon FreeRTOS as the source code is provided under the MIT license.
FreeRTOSTM is a market leading RTOS from Amazon Web Services that supports more than 35 architectures and was downloaded once every 3 minutes during 2017. It is professionally developed, strictly quality controlled, robust, supported, and free to embed in commercial products without any requirement to expose your proprietary source code.
FreeRTOS has become the de facto standard RTOS for microcontrollers by removing common objections to using free software, and in so doing, providing a truly compelling free software model.
