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47 points by chrsw 5 days ago | 7 comments

ymz5 5 days ago

Thanks, chrsw! I encourage people to join the petition to re-license old QNX sources under Apache 2.0. If Blackberry does so, we'll have another good and free microkernel-based OS.

jacquesm 11 hours ago

I spent a ton of time on trying to do just that years ago and it went nowhere, calibrate your hopes accordingly.

wslh 7 hours ago

I checked out and BB revenue report [1] "driven by upbeat strength across its QNX division" (quote). I think this will make more difficult to obtain a QNX license if they don't see it strategic?

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blackberry-q3-earnings-revenu...

jacquesm 7 hours ago

BB is a very traditional company, they're very much stuck in the 90's when it comes to software licensing. There is a BB QnX team member here on HN they can probably shine much more light on this than I can (but I realize they may not be free to talk about it).

ymz5 8 hours ago

Well, there's a plan in case BB doesn't re-license.

We will rewrite the proprietary parts of the kernel from scratch. It's not trivial, but possible.

We could use seL4 as a basis for the "core" message-passing primitives. Channels and connections will go next.

jacquesm 7 hours ago

I've already done this. It's a thing one person can do in under a year.

ahartmetz 11 hours ago

QNX is great. But please be more judicious with the AI writing. It's great at style transfer, so maybe tell it to write like Hemingway or something? He didn't use unnecessary words and repeat the always same "impactful" flourishes.