Yes. The history is awful. Closed source, partially open source with free version, closed source, fully open source with free version (but not for commercial use), and then, suddenly one day, closed source. Twenty years ago, many of the Gnu tools built for QNX by default. That stopped.
You can get a "personal use license" now, but you can't distribute anything that has parts of QNX code in it.
From what people reported around the rugpull, BB pretty much nuked all customer relationships with various groups that had commercial licenses too, not just with people who looked into open source or free-as-in-beer options.
Greatly accelerated AGL with D-Bus (yuck) as patchwork replacement for QNX IPC
Yes, this happened to us as well. It basically killed more than a decade of development. I did write a send/receive/reply/name_attach/name_locate library for Linux, which worked well enough that we could at least rescue the project. But BB killed QnX for large scale software development projects outside of the embedded space, and quite possibly for a lot of those as well (but I had no contact with such groups). There was a point in time where QnX ran a very large fraction of all of the world's infrastructure and BB showed the dangers of relying on a company that never fully committed to their long-term strategy.
All of the acquisitions and license issues did QnX no favors. We built a very large installation on top of it and always felt that Quantum didn't really know what they wanted to be. The BB acquisition was the final nail in the coffin, though, as a platform it was a pretty good illustration of how powerful that whole mechanism is.
Yes. The ownership by Harmon (an audio company) was clueless, and Blackberry was, strangely, no better.
I once told one of their marketing guys "Quit worrying about being pirated and worry more about being ignored."
I wonder if a business model like Epic's would have worked. Unreal Engine is free until you hit US$1 million in revenue, and then they want a cut of revenue.
This works in games because any game with significant revenue is publicly visible.
Less so in operating systems. You could have QNX inside a million traffic lights without anybody knowing.
Yes. The history is awful. Closed source, partially open source with free version, closed source, fully open source with free version (but not for commercial use), and then, suddenly one day, closed source. Twenty years ago, many of the Gnu tools built for QNX by default. That stopped.
You can get a "personal use license" now, but you can't distribute anything that has parts of QNX code in it.
From what people reported around the rugpull, BB pretty much nuked all customer relationships with various groups that had commercial licenses too, not just with people who looked into open source or free-as-in-beer options.
Greatly accelerated AGL with D-Bus (yuck) as patchwork replacement for QNX IPC
Yes, this happened to us as well. It basically killed more than a decade of development. I did write a send/receive/reply/name_attach/name_locate library for Linux, which worked well enough that we could at least rescue the project. But BB killed QnX for large scale software development projects outside of the embedded space, and quite possibly for a lot of those as well (but I had no contact with such groups). There was a point in time where QnX ran a very large fraction of all of the world's infrastructure and BB showed the dangers of relying on a company that never fully committed to their long-term strategy.
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All of the acquisitions and license issues did QnX no favors. We built a very large installation on top of it and always felt that Quantum didn't really know what they wanted to be. The BB acquisition was the final nail in the coffin, though, as a platform it was a pretty good illustration of how powerful that whole mechanism is.
Yes. The ownership by Harmon (an audio company) was clueless, and Blackberry was, strangely, no better.
I once told one of their marketing guys "Quit worrying about being pirated and worry more about being ignored."
I wonder if a business model like Epic's would have worked. Unreal Engine is free until you hit US$1 million in revenue, and then they want a cut of revenue. This works in games because any game with significant revenue is publicly visible. Less so in operating systems. You could have QNX inside a million traffic lights without anybody knowing.
2 replies →