Our visibility has gone up immensely in the past eight months: over a million downloads of the QNX realtime platform since September 2000. But it's hard to tell how much of that visibility is due to our source model and how much is due to the fact that people are simply hungry for the kind of reliability, speed, and efficiency that the QNX OS can offer. There is no question, however, that the developer community has welcomed our accessible source model, and that it will continue to help increase our popularity.

Why is QNX not released under GPL?

The vast majority of QNX's core technology is wholly owned and authored by QNX, and the source that we provide is covered under our own licensing agreement, which gives developers the freedom to create derivative works without having to sacrifice any of their own intellectual property (IP). One reason we use our own license, and not the GPL, is that intellectual property is a huge issue for our embedded OEMs customers. Many won't even consider GPL. We need to provide them with a license that provides the productivity of open source, but that also accommodates their IP requirements.

What are the popular applications ported to QNX?

Remember that, because QNX conforms to POSIX and Unix standards, many Unix and Linux applications can port to QNX without little or no modification. For example, QNX can run Unix-based software like Apache, Perl, and GateD natively, without code changes.

Having said that, it's hard to know where to start. But let's see…

If you download the QNX realtime platform, you'll get:

Flash Player from Macromedia, RealPlayer from RealNetworks, ICA client from Citrix, RenderWare 3D toolkit from Criterion, and so on. You'll also get hundreds of POSIX and Unix utilities, from awk to zcat.

If you go to sites like tucows.com or qnxstart.com, you get:

ICQ client, IRC client, Napster client, Lynx browser, Lilliput, and many others.

Others I can think of include:

Opera web browser

FreeAmp MP3 player

REBOL/Core

VisualAge J9 virtual machine from IBM

How does QNX compare with Linux?