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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

My question remains, would this money have been better spent in buying QNX?

Could an open-source QNX accomplish all of Google's goals?

Given that QNX cannot be killed, and the cost to Google in attempting to do so (or enacting major change for legacy customers) would be catastrophic...

Why not buy a working microkernel? Are there other commercial microkernels that are more attractive?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

Maybe Samsung should buy it, and put themselves in the driver's seat on Android. (They did buy Joyent, and SmartOS seems fine.)

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BlackBerry isn't selling it. It's the only active line of business that they really have anymore.

QNX is in 215 million cars.

Just buy BB then?

"I just bought the airline. It seemed neater."

It's too expensive for what they'd get out of the deal. Buying BB would cost them between 3B-4B$.

They've made less than 10 $B acquisitions, with Motorola Mobility being the most expensive at 12B and was for patents.

I think if Google acquired BB for the QNX business that they wouldn't give it adequate attention and would run it into the ground.

Agreed.

Do you know what is there business model?

As in do they charge per unit sold? Or have a flat license? Do you know what would be aprox costs per unit for a startup say for QNX Neutrino?

No one can tell you how much your startup would have to pay apart from BlackBerry themselves. If you want a quote, just contact them.

Good point, I would like Google using QNX for their mobile OS, too, because of the Hard Real-Time OS feature. Or keep using Linux, but putting more effort on it, e.g. adding better NDK support, without relying in Java at all, a la iOS.

> Good point, I would like Google using QNX for their mobile OS, too, because of the Hard Real-Time OS feature.

Why?

Everything which needs hard-real time in a phone already does that at the firmware level. I fail to see what is that latency sensible in the rest. If what you want is a faster phone, a hard-real time kernel is not going to give you that. Hard real-time just means you have strong garanties on time of execution (either through return or through failure) it does not necessary means these times are short.

Java on Android is not slow anyway.

User interaction is latency sensitive. In particular on cheaper phones it could make a huge difference.

> Or keep using Linux, but putting more effort on it, e.g. adding better NDK support, without relying in Java at all, a la iOS.

Or maybe a clean slate from the mistakes of existing legacy devices and not inheriting the old cruft found in kernels like Linux or in full OSes like QNX that are not designed or optimised for use cases such as smart-devices, IoT, desktops, etc.

It seems like Google has had enough of tolerating the giant contraption that has strangled them for years with using Linux in Android, and ChromeOS and would want to purse a new approach similar to Windows, and macOS with Fuchsia and creating an ecosystem of apps written in Dart, and using Flutter.

They could also have considered porting Minix 3 OS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix_3 - to the mobile platform. It is freely available with far less restrictive license than Linux. The only "production" ready and usable Linux based mobile OS currently is Sailfish OS - https://sailfishos.org/ . There is also Tizen OS https://www.tizen.org/ and LG's webOS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS , though I don't know how how much Linux support is open to use in these two.

How about just fork Linux, and then they can keep it ABI compatible all they like?

Linux is terrible security wise.

QNX is probably not great and it's a whole bag of hurt to bring it to modern standards of safety and performance/power saving

What an ironic statement given the deployments in High Integrity Computing, and being the production OS for NVidia's automative software (where GNU/Linux is used for development purposes).

But is QNX in those situations generally connected to the Internet or to arbitrary untrusted devices?

Good to know. It seems blackberry is putting the work into these

> production OS.

Which cars is it deployed on? It would be good to keep an eye on recalls and reported software issues.

QNX is more like Symbian than Android, a long dead breed of embedded OS used in many un-connected cars. Not going to cause problems at this stage.

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