It was, for a while. Blackberry did revoke QNX source code access. The original poster had a copy around from the open source era, and thus was able to fix "ps".
I once told a QNX sales rep that their problem was not being pirated. It was being ignored. Today, I'd say "forgotten".
no, it never was. the qnx source code was available, but it wasn't under an open-source license. if it were, given the number of fans it had in its heyday, there'd be at least one live qnx fork
> You must obtain a written license from and pay applicable license fees to QNX Software Systems before you may reproduce, modify or distribute this software, or any work that includes all or part of this software. Free development licenses are available for evaluation and non-commercial purposes. For more information visit http://licensing.qnx.com or email licensing@qnx.com.
Right, it was never under an open source license, but you could look at the code.
Re-implementing the QNX 6 kernel in Rust would have been a nice project. It's only about 60 kilobytes of code.
All the kernel does is pass messages around, dispatch the CPU, and run timers. All device drivers are in user space. You can build a boot image with whatever processes you want running at startup, so you can have device drivers at boot.
For smaller embedded applications, everything might be loaded at boot. You don't have to have a disk or file systems. There are embedded real-time applications where having zero persistent state is desirable.
