OpenQNX Source (2007)
github.com
github.com
A Rust replacement for the QNX kernel would be useful. It really is a good OS. Much better suited to real-time and embedded than Linux.
QNX started out closed source, went open source, went closed source, went open source, and went closed source again. By which time third party developers were totally fed up with the company. GCC, Eclipse, Firefox, and Thunderbird all ran on QNX at one time. Around 20 years ago, you could run it on the desktop. I used to do that when I was working on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. I could run the real-time vehicle software on the desktop, hooked to a simulator, without it missing a scheduled even while a browser was running.
I once told one of their sales reps, "Quit worrying about people pirating your product, worry about people ignoring it."
I don’t think it was ever, strictly speaking, open source. There was a time they offered a source code license for free to anyone who asked, but that wasn’t true “open source”, because among other reasons, you had no right to redistribute it. And then they discontinued that-which meant people who’d gotten the source that way could keep it, but anyone who had failed to take up that offer while it was available missed out, and those who had it distributing to others would be violating the license by doing so. If it had been truly open source, they could not have “turned off the tap” quite so easily.
RIM also had patents on elliptical curve cryptography that turned out to be more valuable than anything else they could make.
It was so much money that it distorted the company towards IP rent-seeking instead of making good new stuff. So of course they focused on piracy with QNX instead of just getting it into everything.
It's very much like the thing where Google keeps trying to make new products and cancels them because they aren't as profitable as the advertising business.
Weirdly, QNX is my daily bread and butter. It's the leading OS for building controls and I'm logged into four QNX-based systems at different buildings this very second. One of the niches they managed to hold onto.
At least my car runs QNX. Somewhere.
Ford's Sync 3, Sync 4, and Sync 4A in-dash systems are all QNX running a HTML5 based UI, though the next revision will apparently be changing to Android.
As far as I'm aware most of the fully digital instrument clusters use QNX for the critical elements like required gauges and warning lights, then usually run another system in a VM or container to display any infotainment content under those critical elements.
https://www.autoconnectedcar.com/2019/09/denso-blackberry-qn...
and some folks even took a crack at jailbreaking it:
Then we started developing some stuff for it ( Basic stuff like hello world and such ). The teacher was really into QNX and said it was the next Linux thingy. Later he went all in on Red Hat and started to teach on that instead.