BlackBerry Maker To Buy QNX For RTOS & Dev. Suite

Freshly Exhumed writes "Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones, said on Friday it will buy QNX Software Systems, makers of Real-Time Operating Systems, for an undisclosed amount as it moves to boost integration of its devices with in-vehicle audio systems. QNX Neutrino is a Unix-like RTOS, and their Momentics development suite is for embedded applications for a wide variety of industries. While RIM has offered somewhat limited support of open source projects on its BlackBerry platform, the future of QNX's Foundry27 development project, which uses the Apache 2.0 license, has not yet been mentioned."

Comments

Re:Please don't fuck this up, RIM

[RAMMS EIN]

I second the sentiment that QNX is a great operating system. My first contact with it was through the incredible 1.44 MB QNX Demo Disk, which was a bootable 1.44 MB diskette image containing QNX (4.something, I think), with GUI and graphical web browser. Did I mention that the OS was POSIX-compliant and real-time? At the time, Linux and XFree86 absolutely paled in comparison.

While on the topic, I would like to say that I would like to have a desktop OS that provided real-time guarantees (or at least "most of the time"). On my shiny multi-GHz, multi-core, multi-GB-of-RAM machine, Firefox still manages to hang the user interface for multiple seconds when it first starts up and I type something it the Awesome bar. I'd like to at least be able to switch windows and start sending input to another application in = 0.1 seconds! If we could extend the real-time guarantees to a GUI library so that we could have, say, button click animations and other "I got your message and I'm working on it" feedback to respond within certain time frames, that would be great.