alt Hacker NewsIf only you could believe them.
QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again.
Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for three years when working on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle.
All of that went away after the Harman acquisition of QNX in 2004.
Then, in 2007, QNX went open source. You could even look at the microkernel. It wasn't openly licensed, but you could look inside and build it.
In 2010, RIM acquired QNX, and, with no warning, closed the source. All open source development related to QNX ceased, and QNX lost all credibility in the community. So QNX shot itself in the foot. Twice.
Note the contractual terms.[1] "TERMINATION. This Agreement and licenses granted hereunder may be terminated by either Party upon written notice to the other Party". QNX can pull the plug at any time. Since they've done so twice in the past, there's a good chance that will happen again.
Now, if QNX is serious about this, the way to go is to use the licensing model Epic uses for Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is behind most AAA game titles. The basic terms are that you can download the source and use it for anything you want, and there's no charge until you get the first $1 million in revenue from your product. Then Epic takes a 5% royalty.[2] This has been extremely successful for Epic. There's not much of a piracy problem, because if your game gets enough revenue to matter, it has enough visibility that their licensing people will notice. Meanwhile, there's a large pool of people using Unreal Engine.
That's the way to do it if you want more adoption of QNX. Take the Epic term sheet to your lawyers and management. And have them take a look at Unreal Engine's revenue growth vs. QNX.
As I once told a QNX sales rep, your problem isn't that you're being pirated. It's that you're being ignored.
[1] http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=51624
[2] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/UnrealEngine/faq/UnrealEngineE...
Replies
> Now, if QNX is serious about this, the way to go is to use the licensing model Epic uses for Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is behind most AAA game titles. The basic terms are that you can download the source and use it for anything you want, and there's no charge until you get the first $1 million in revenue from your product. Then Epic takes a 5% royalty.[2] This has been extremely successful for Epic. There's not much of a piracy problem, because if your game gets enough revenue to matter, it has enough visibility that their licensing people will notice. Meanwhile, there's a large pool of people using Unreal Engine.
One option: Dual-license as GPLv3 (the 3 is important!) or commercial license. Hobbyists and FOSS projects will be quite happy to use a GPLv3 OS. The big commercial users - traditionally cars and other embedded uses - will not want to be legally obligated to give users the ability to install custom firmware (which GPLv3 basically requires), so they'll still pay for it. Everyone wins.
(IANAL, this is not legal advice, interpret licenses yourself.)
Shitty dx is baked into RIM/Blackberry's institutional DNA.
I had a long conversation with their engineering people way back before BB10 came out. At the time you had to apply to get access to the full blackberry SDK, and IIRC you also had to sign an NDA. Meanwhile Android and iOS were in full swing and wouldn't you know it, the platforms that had better developer experience, that prioritized making it easy to write apps, were successful.
Blackberry is just institutionally incapable of handling this sort of relationship with the community. It's that legacy telco "us vs them" mindset at the top of the org, and it filters down whether implicitly or explicitly.
Back before 2004, QNX could have still been relevant as there was still a lot of OS experimentation from the user/developer themsevels. They could have attracted enough people to carve a niche even in the desktop space at that time.
After beos failed, I played/developed with QNX until they pulled the rug. I was on it full time on my main dev machine. I loved it.
When they closed it I got severely burned to the point that I will not touch a any closed development platform. I see from the license they didn't change a bit.
Not that it matters anymore.. they're largely irrelevant today except for whatever existing markets they already have. It would be fooling to choose QNX today: we now have good alternatives, and all of them with open licenses.
Also I wonder how many applications really need more real time responsiveness than you can get out of Linux. We even have
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/real-time-linux-is-o...
If I use Linux I know I won't have to have a discussion about licensing, I know I won't get rug pulled, etc.
Also the ban on commercial use is heinous. I am going through this with Arangodb right now. I love the product, but I have no budget for a cloud instance they manage and I have no budget to talk with their sales people about a commercial license. I have several systems that use it (including one that's about 80% of a way to a "too big for free" database) and I don't know if their fate will be (a) open sourcing, (b) a product or (c) a system that makes money for me directly but for me the short path is to switch to postgres, not talk to people whose business model doesn't necessarily allow my business model.
For everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640
>QNX went open source.
Not open source. Those words have a specific definition[0], which QNX never met.
Even getting the licensing right isn't sufficient. They could license it as MIT today, close source it again tomorrow, and within a few releases no one would be using the MIT version.
Unless someone is interested in maintaining a full fork. It's the same reason Google can do whatever they want with Chromium even though it's technically open source. No one else has the resources/will to maintain it so there's no credible threat of a fork.
So it's not just me. I asked for a license to do pkgsrc package building on QNX, got rejected, and couldn't even get a human to respond to my messages with anything that didn't resemble a copied-and-pasted form response.
They gave the impression at the time that they really couldn't be bothered with open source. This just happened to be not long after 2010.
> As I once told a QNX sales rep, your problem isn't that you're being pirated. It's that you're being ignored.
Microsoft realized that a long time ago. That's why you could always get Windows for free if you knew where to look.
QNX will lose even more since linux merged the RT patches. There is almost no reason to use QNX on an embedded system where linux is also available.
It is sad. With GNU it could have been something interesting.
Unreal engine has certainly had its licensing issues.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/5/23905082/epic-unreal-engi...
I worked for a startup in Germany that was acquired by RIM/Blackberry in 2011. The company tried to get all the employees to sign new contracts for their existing roles and pay. The new contracts put severe IP limitations on everyone. All open source was forbidden. Many of us were very active in open source at the time. (I had worked for the Eclipse Foundation). A friend who wrote fiction was told he’d need written permission for each story he wanted to post or publish. They insisted that German engineers sign contracts where the binding language was English even though it was provided with a German translation. Many of us just left instead. My favorite line from the transition team sent from Canada was about how lucky we were going to be that they’d let us keep our awesome office in Munich because everyone at RIM worked in dark concrete dungeons. Yeah, how lucky we were that we could keep what we had.
Open anything is just completely foreign to that company’s DNA. I would not trust them an inch.