Friday, April 23, 2010

QNX-RIM merge stopped most of Foundry 27 repositories

I usually avoid to post personal opinions and try to post only technically-oriented messages, but I couldn't hold this one (and I feel I shouldn't suppress no more my comments about what's going on in the industry).

While many people on the net (and especially several QNX developers in their blogs) expressed mostly positive feelings about QNX - Research In Motion (RIM) merge, I found a disturbing side note - the new owner of QNX business is cutting free/open source developers' SVN access to the famous QNX Foundry 27 (collection of QNX SVN repositories). Here is what one of QNX dudes says (source: http://truegryc.blogspot.com/2010/04/yesterday-qnx-wins-ocri-award-today-qnx.html): 

Most of the people are excited about seeing QNX RTOS on new Blackberry models, other seeing RIM is hungry for some car infotainment cash, but what I see is that in any of these ways the open-source/non-commercial developers are an "obstacle" for the new business ideas of RIM. So, thank you guys for porting tons of applications for your favourite RTOS, we love you all but this is it. Our love is over. Go find some other RTOS to waste your time with, we don't need you anymore.

What pisses me off is that QNX made great effort to create relationships with free software movement and developers, and after year or two things started to shape like there is something really cool happening, not just another cash-hungry company seducing developer-dumb-asses-with-lots-of-free-time to do work for free. And now we see that all this was for nothing. Different singer, same song.

We'll see what will happen next - may be RIM has stopped the repositories to prepare a release of Blackberry OS as free/open-source software? Hahaha...


Note: Each word in this blog is my personal opinion.

Note2: Seems that one of the repositories is still functioning - http://community.qnx.com/svn/repos/bsp