Building a QNX 7 Desktop
Nice to see QNX getting some love on HN.<p>QNX is one of the most ground breaking OSs that I&#x27;ve seen in real life and had the pleasure to work with for a good five years as my &#x27;day job&#x27;. It was so good that everything else felt (and still feels) both sluggish and cumbersome by comparison. Imagine an OS that <i>never</i> freezes, one that allows you to restart device drivers and upgrade them on running systems. Use remote resources as if they are local. Control hardware in real time from the same machine that runs your desktop. What held it back is that the company that sold it (Quantum Software in Montreal, Canada) wanted to charge for every bit that left their premises and for a long time it looked as if that strategy was going to win them the race.<p>Then FREEBSD86 happened and suddenly a lot of router vendors had an alternative, then came Minix and finally Linux. Now none of those three are as good at what QNX does best: hard real time, message passing, clustering. So the fit for these other OS&#x27;s to occupy QNX&#x27;s niche was never a good one. And so Quantum stayed alive a little longer. I petitioned them for a 32 bit version when they were still fully behind their 16 bit OS and refused to even consider making a 32 bit version because their old product was selling well and because backwards compatibility must have been a hard nut to crack for them.<p>So, in about 2 years I wrote a kernel that lifted the userland mostly from minix and linux. Added a network stack and if not for some unfortunate affairs it would have been released as open source.<p>In a way I&#x27;m happy that never happened because I would have been the slave of the rest of the world maintaining that. It&#x27;s one thing to push an application into the world, those things have a life-span. But an operating system will easily outlive its creators. The fact that Quantum was super aggressive when it came to IP also didn&#x27;t help the chances of a release.<p>Every day your life is touched by 100&#x27;s if not 1000&#x27;s of instances of QNX still quietly chugging away somewhere in the belly of the systems that keep our infrastructure working.<p>I&#x27;d love to see a 64 bit open sourced version of QNX take over, there is really no substitute for an OS with a sense of time. But I&#x27;m afraid it will have to stay a dream, the stewards of QNX have never really dared to commit to open sourcing it for real, I&#x27;ve been asking them for long enough now that I feel that will simply not happen.