The weirdest QNX bug I've ever encountered

"Then QNX was bought, source code access was revoked and the community largely withered away. Questions were increasingly asked via private support tickets directly to QNX, locked away from the public. QNX know-how becomes harder and harder to acquire, open source software for modern QNX releases is essentially non-existent and the driver situation is a catastrophe. The QNX kernel is the most beautiful and interesting kernel I have ever had the pleasure of working with, but it lies in the shackles of corporate ownership."

It's sad.

QNX was originally an independent company. During that period, anyone could get a free copy of QNX for personal use. It wasn't open source, but it was available. It's POSIX-compatible, so it was a supported target for Gnu, Firefox, and Eclipse. We used QNX for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2003-2005, and all that code was developed on desktop QNX.

Then QNX was acquired by Harmon, the successor to Harmon-Kardon, which once made home audio components and pivoted to car audio. They were thinking car infotainment. Harmon didn't really know what to do with an operating system, especially since the big market was systems for industrial control and point of sale. So eventually they opened the source.

Then QNX was acquired by Blackberry, the early smartphone company. They closed the source, very suddenly. They even killed off the free version for personal and educational use. So all third party open source development stopped. Blackberry eventually shipped a phone that ran QNX, but they were not powerful enough as a company to keep a third phone standard going. So Blackberry went to Android.

Blackberry killed off the self-hosted desktop environment, and users now had to cross-compile from Windows.

And QNX became more of a niche product than ever.

Their moat is supposedly their ASIL certification, but I see that value shrinking more and more over time for the following reasons:

1. If your product has a software-related failure, customers won't care about all of your certifications. Only the end product.

2. I'm not convinced that the QNX kernel is less buggy than the Linux kernel. Also, most failures don't tend to be kernel related.

Other than that, the blog post was very interesting, I learned a bit of history of QNX, and concluded that I should avoid it.