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.

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Animats an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jacquesm 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The problem with operating systems is that if they work well they're all but invisible. They only attract attention when they malfunction. QNX allowed us to focus on the problems we were solving, rather than that it drew a lot of attention to itself. I walked into a project that was already years underway and started working on core application components within a few weeks of reading the QNX manual (which I thought was excellent, by the way, not unlike the documentation that came with Mark Williams C). The OS was facilitating what you wanted to do rather than that you were fighting it every step of the way. The main application we wrote (and of which I rewrote significant chunks) processed a record number of messages on every Monday morning, week after week, year after year. It was a massive cash cow for the company that had commissioned it (KVSA, https://www.kvsa.nl/en/data-and-intelligence/bts-broker-tool... , it is still alive but it no longer runs on QNX) and if not for QNX I doubt it would have gotten as far as it did. Especially in those first few years when it was mostly my old boss and one or two helpers building it. The OS pretty much enforced clean abstraction layers by showing at the OS level itself how this was done. Extending that was a natural path and I suspect that many QNX shops did this simply because it felt right and made it easy. They likely did not realize they were building what we would call a 'service oriented architecture' many years later and in a completely different context. This experience still leaves me looking at many of the systems we use today as unnecessarily bloated and frankly, quite ugly. QNX was light weight, but not a lightweight. The only other eco-systems that give me that same feeling are Plan9 and Erlang.