Episode 873 transcript

FLOSS-873 Jonathan: This week, Aaron and Andy join me to talk about QNX. It's the other operating system that runs in a whole bunch of different places. It really has safety and real-time nailed down. There's just one little problem. This is FLOSS Weekly, episode 873, recorded Tuesday, June the 30th. Wait, that's not open source It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're talking about a Unix or a Unix derivative or a Unix-like. I'm not sure which of those terms is technically correct. We're talking about QNX. It runs a whole lot of places. It used to run on your BlackBerry, and it runs a lot of places that you don't think about. Maybe not on your toaster, but maybe on your car. Anyway, we've got we've got Andy Green and we've got Aaron Bassett to talk about QNX, where the company is, where they're going, what changes are there, and why, maybe you should think about doing some development on it. Let's go ahead and bring them on. Guys, welcome. Welcome to the show. It is great to have you both here. Andy: Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Jonathan: Thanks for having us. Yeah. And now, we gotta start with this. We have to start with this, right? So this is the show about open source, Floss Weekly, free, libre, open source software. We're not... We don't do dentistry here. We do open source stuff. QNX, at least like the core of it, the kernel of it it's closed source. And what are we even doing here, guys? Get get out. What's Andy: the conversation? Yeah. Why are we on this show? Jonathan: Why does this Andy: make sense? Yeah, no that, that's very fair. So I, we have had a kind of a really interesting and long evolving story with open source, and I think for some of your audience who may remember, we did go fully open source at one point in our history. And and that was like right around the time when we were acquired by Research In Motion for use in the BlackBerry, and they were thinking, "Hey this stuff is special sauce. We really don't want this to be, like-" "... our... one of our defining characteristics. We don't want to be fully out there because we wanna actually have some of that proprietary goodness for ourselves, for our own phones." So we clawed that back. And so that that is something that I think, a lot of us in QNX were not necessarily... we understood the business rationale for that and all that. But I think that there was always this feeling that, there's a lot of good and value that we get with working in the open source community and with the open source community, and we wanted to bring some of that back. And so I think relatively recently we've had this, So I guess QNX Everywhere has been a program that, that both Aaron and I are part of both sides of the, on the technical side and on the s- sort of more on the business side. And that's been around for about a year and a half. And that's been our start back to recognizing, l- look we need to be more involved with the community. We need to be more transparent. We need to open ourselves up a little bit more. So I'm not gonna make a commitment and say, "Hey, yeah, we're going all open source," or anything like that. We're not gonna, make that same mistake of making commitments and then pulling back on them. But what we are doing is we are trying to open up a lot of the pieces that we see don't really have impact on our business. Because I'll be frank, there's a few different things that are factors as to where- whether or not we do things open source or not. And one of the big ones is that a majority of our business is based on regulated industries. Things that either have functional safety components or cybersecurity components or things like that. And in a lot of cases there's this thing called SOUP, which is software of unknown providence that is an acronym that's used within those sort of, certification bodies or regulatory communities. And having open source software in a lot of cases makes things extremely difficult to pass through certification. Not because of the testing or anything like that, it's because you can't really guarantee where that software has come from, or you have a very difficult time tracing the line through of all the edits that have been made to it- from different contributing parties. So we have to be super careful and super cautious about things that are gonna impact our business. So we don't we're not gonna go and say, "Oh, yeah, hey, you're, we're gonna open source the kernel," because then anybody can contribute to it, and then we turn ar