Canada's QNX moves even closer to Linux - Brief Article

Electronics Times, Feb 28, 2000

Canadian RTOS supplier QNX has decided to try to broaden the developer base for its embedded operating systems by making them much more compatible with Linux.

At the same time, the company has moved into the market for multimedia and high-end games platforms by making its environment compatible with software developed for Playstation2 and OpenGL on PCs.

Greg Bergsma, vice-president of worldwide sales for QNX, said: "We are looking to enable a third-party community that will develop applications for devices in the way you can for Palm Pilot.

"The foundation platform has to be open. We have adopted open tools, such as the Gnu tools, and we have adopted elements like the Linux sound architecture.

"We have been learning from what is going on in the open-source environment. We have been implementing Linux APIs as they become available."

For games and 3D visualisation, QNX has adopted three software libraries. The company is developing a port of Renderware3 from UK- based Criterion Software, which was designed as middleware for the Playstation2. QNX has also ported 3Dfx's Glide and the open-source version of OpenGL, Mesa.

The company has incorporated RealPlayer, Macromedia's Flash and encoding technologies such as MP3, MPEG and Dolby AC-3 into a multimedia suite for its operating systems.

Rather than use the joint marketing arrangements common to the embedded market, QNX has taken responsibility for selling much of the third- party software that runs on its operating system.