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QNX "Opens" Source Code
Arista writes "QNX has announced that effective immediately, the company will open the source code to its QNX embedded, RTOS, microkernel operating system. From the press release: "Effective immediately, QNX will make source code for its award-winning, microkernel-based OS available for free download. The first source release includes the code to the QNX Neutrino microkernel, the base C library, and a variety of board support packages for popular embedded and computing hardware." OSNews features an interview with the CEO of QNX, Dan Dodge, on this announcement."
This is huge news. One of the most popular paper ballot systems, the ES&S model 100 optical scan runs on QNX. this means it is now theoretically possible that ES&S could go open source if they wanted to.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I guess it has no more value if they are going to give it away. It's dead in the sense that OS/2 and CP/M are dead.
I find the history of QNX very frustrating. When I first heard of it in the mid 80s, it was advertised as a simple Unix-like OS with very low hardware requirements. It was network-aware, supported distributed computing, and had a nice microkernel architecture.
But the most important thing was that it was a real OS, with the ability to multitask and to effectively isolate hardware from software. Contrast this with MS-DOS 3.0, which had only the most primitve, kludgy excuse for background processing. (Patterson knew zilch about os design when he set out to clone CP/M; it never occurred to him that OS code needed to be reentrant. And MS-DOS did a really lousy job of isolating hardware from software. Ironically, this fuckup assured lockin of the IBM-compatible/PC combination: software written for this platform was essential impossible to port to other platforms.
What was particularly tantalizing was that QNX claimed to run well even on very limited hardware — even 8088 systems were said to run robustly. And it shared some key features with CTOS an first-rate OS that was then dying off, due to its dependence on proprietary hardware.
The problem with QNX was that commercial license fees were very high; that's why I never played with it. It did become popular at universities (cheap academic licenses) and among certain kinds of embedded application developers (because of its nice feature set and minimal hardware requirements. I'm told that by the late 80s, most video stores used POS systems based on QNX.
Then MS-DOS/Windows started grabbing more and more of the market and QNX was forced to specialize. So for a long time now they've advertised themselves as a real-time operating system. And yes, their real-time features are very good — but they're just one part of a really good general-purpose OS.
Now, much too late to do me any good, there's an open-source version of QNX. I wish the QNX OSS community well, but there's just no place for it in the world I work in. Hopefully, embedded application developers will keep QNX alive. But I'll always be sad that QNX never found a following among common PC users — which it surely would have if the marketplace were driven by technical excellence instead of various sordid realities. This is one of the great lost opportunities in computing history. And should be a lesson to Linux advocates who think they can easily displace Microsoft.
Yeah that may sound trollish, but there are several companies that are doing the open source thing because they are not doing so well.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I'm just saying QNX is not doing as well as I think they would like to.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Let me know when Minix actually supports virtual memory pages. Last I looked it was using segments, which aside from being clumsy, aren't very portable. There are plenty of other more innovative OS's that are much further along than Minix. You could do worse than to look at L4 and Coyotos. You could also do worse than to look at Minix, certainly, but just don't stop there.