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Comment by i336_ | Hacker News Reader

Arrrrrgh.

Roar.

QNX was cautiously courting the open source concept and venturing in the direction of shared source (with some code already available), when BlackBerry bought them and threw all of that out the window.

Biggest yanked opportunity. D:

Now QNX is all-commercial again, with source only available under a license. And Photon is gone, too: no more self-hosting.

I wish BB would(/could?) do the webOS thing with QNX. That would be amazing. The community would absolutely get Photon up and running again, it would be an alternative to Linux and BSD.

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I know. QNX the OS was great. QNX the company has been a huge pain to deal with for more than a decade. They had a tough problem, though. Who else sold a desktop OS for real money any more? Unlike Microsoft and Apple, they had no other revenue stream. Still, until about 2005, QNX was considered a target which UNIX-like software should support. There was an early version of Firefox (called Firebird) for it, all the command-line GNU tools were available, and the Eclipse IDE worked fine. For three years, while I was working on a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, I ran QNX on the desktop.

Photon, the GUI, probably had the sanest internals of any major GUI system.

Dan Dodge, who designed much of QNX, was CEO of QNX, and he retired from QNX/Blackberry to go work for Apple. Apple might end up doing something in this direction. But if they do, they'll never let the internals out.

I'm curious what was wrong with QNX the company, in terms of the practical ramifications of what you're describing.

I assume you were using QNX for the GC vehicle compo because of its RTOS qualities? In any case, that's awesome.

I thought Photon was pretty cool too, at least from a "oh hey these screenshots look awesome" perspective. I vaguely recall running it in a VM, once, so long ago I only hazily remember poking around the sidebar. Sadly it'll be somewhat challenging to do further academic research on that subject now, I wish the educational/noncommercial free options still existed there.

Also, I found (and bookmarked) this HN thread from some time ago that's got some QNX gems in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834334 (very curious about the modem)

And you're very sadly right about Apple, they're very unlikely to release the truly interesting bits of any projects like this.

Woops, typed text/html out of habit, meant text/plain. base64 -di works just fine too.

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