Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 12th Aug 2007 20:23 UTC
A few years ago, I was an avid QNX user. I used the non-commercial desktop version of this wonderfully clean and elegant pure-microkernel operating system for a long period of time, as a desktop operating system. I liked the whole style of this operating system, its Photon user interface, and its excellent package management system. I even wrote a three-page article about it. Sadly, QSS, the company behind QNX, lost all interest in the non-commercial desktop version, and ditched it, leaving only a hard-to-find 30-day evaluation version alive. Community interest dwindled, and so did mine. Despite my lost interest, it saddened me today to learn that QNXZone.com, a community portal for QNX, has been shut down. Read on for a few short thoughts.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
You're not missing anything. QNX is a proprietary OS with proprietary development tools. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially for the embedded market. But it's impossible to support a community this way. Not when there's other alternatives like MINIX or Haiku that allow community participation.
Not all operating systems are meant to be developed into desktop platforms. QNX had surprising promise as a desktop, but there was a lot more money to be made elsewhere. In the x86 server market, desktop presence leads to valuable mindshare. But in the embedded real-time market, the desktop is virtually irrelevant.