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BlackBerry Maker To Buy QNX For RTOS & Dev. Suite

Posted by Soulskill on from the expanding-the-portfolio dept.

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."

4 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Please don't fuck this up, RIM by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    QNX is quite possibly the best operating system available. The tools are great, and the OS itself can do some pretty ridiculous things. To start with, it's extremely fast - even with the Photon GUI (another great feature) loaded, it only consumes something like 25MB of RAM on x86, and slightly less on ARM. That's impressive. Then let's go into the clustering features - if they're turned on, then processes are automatically and transparently distributed among any QNX machines on the local network.

    On the other hand, I haven't been that impressed with the way QNX Systems has been handling the platform lately. Momentics can't even self-host anymore, and the UI has gotten a lot worse in my opinion. That being said, I hope RIM doesn't do an IBM-style acquisition where they just take the bits of the victim company that they like and kill everything else.

    1. Re:Please don't fuck this up, RIM by Tapewolf · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Absolutely. AFAIK this thing is so rock-solid that it's used for safety-critical things like medical equipment and aerospace stuff. I absolutely do not want to see it go down the pan, even though I don't use it myself.

  2. QNX? Memories by houghi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Internet on a floppy. Brought me a lot of fun. Boot the floppy, connect and surf away.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  3. Replacement phone OS? by idiot900 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does this mean there will be a new kernel for the phones, and a POSIX userland API exposed to developers? This announcement, combined with previous noises about Flash on BlackBerry, make me suspect so. RIM's JVM and apps are still cripplingly slow when compared to the pizzazz-filled user experience of the iPhone...