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For anyone who (like me) was confused at what this is, it's a Unix like OS for embedded systems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
They are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.
With linux options in embedded space aplenty, who would want to move to a propriety os? QNX's big brother Vxworks has already been pushed out of most consumer embedded devices and is now limited to space probes and critical medical equipment. I just don't see a future for QNX anywhere.
Why would I use QNX for any project when RTOS Linux is mature? Why would I care? So you can rug-pull license changes? Should I use it because it's cute? It's academically interesting? Sure, I've used QNX in the past for those reasons. The next time I pick a soc for a project, and its associated bsp, I'm not going to look for QNX. I'm either going to use whatever freertos distro they include or install the android bui…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.
I think we're at something like 235 millions cars on the road today with QNX inside. The volume blows my mind. We're also hiding inside lots of healthcare products, industrial control systems, etc. There's lots of interesting key differences between something based on Linux, for example, and QNX. Worth digging into if you're interested in these things. My colleague wrote a short ebook and the intro has a good summary…
https://ethw.org/Milestones:TRON_Real-time_Operating_System_...
which was demoed running on an 80186 with _multiple_ windows running videos w/o dropping a frame.
Described as "The most installed operating system in the world":
https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/the-most-popular-operatin...
Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department viewed the Japanese plan to place it on all computers in their educational system as anti-competitive.
Really wish it was available for the Raspberry Pi.
If only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for th…
Even getting the licensing right isn't sufficient. They could license it as MIT today, close source it again tomorrow, and within a few releases no one would be using the MIT version. Unless someone is interested in maintaining a full fork. It's the same reason Google can do whatever they want with Chromium even though it's technically open source. No one else has the resources/will to maintain it so there's no credi…
I think a fork could have some maintainers. I'd be more worried about people wanting to put new features in than anything else.
If only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for th…
If only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for th…
In case you are wondering: QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system owned by BlackBerry, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. From https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx
The "unix-like" characterisation seems it might be be from the Wikipedia QNX article and repeated by a lot of web content. But it doesn't seem really accurate to me and it's not used by their own web site or documentation. It seems quite opposite to Unix in a lot of ways even though it has some API compatibility.
“In the early 80's they began work on a small message passing kernel based OS that had some user interface similarities to UNIX.”
“They called their product QUNIX, reportedly because it was a "Quick UNIX". They named their company Quantum Software Systems Limited. The QUNIX name lasted a year or two until they received notice from AT&T; that a change would be appropriate. Always ready for a challenge, they changed the spelling to QNX® without changing the pronunciation.”
If only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for th…
Even getting the licensing right isn't sufficient. They could license it as MIT today, close source it again tomorrow, and within a few releases no one would be using the MIT version. Unless someone is interested in maintaining a full fork. It's the same reason Google can do whatever they want with Chromium even though it's technically open source. No one else has the resources/will to maintain it so there's no credi…
If only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for th…
For everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640
I wonder how far Redox's microkernel design is from what that comment describes.