Open sourcing closed source software

Stop the presses. Hold everything. Though only rumored to exist within the mind of author Hugh Lofting, a creature that can simultaneously go both forwards and backwards has been discovered. That’s right, the rarest animal of all, the highly sought after and extraordinarily fabled Pushmi-Pullyu truly exists — albeit without all of the fur.

, a company famed for creating real-time operating systems (RTOSes) for more than 30 years, last week announced that it would cross-pollinate open source and commercial software domains by opening access to the source code for its QNX Neutrino RTOS under a hybrid software licensing agreement. That may sound a lot like Microsoft’s pseudo-hybrid Shared Source Initiative. However, just like Lofting’s fantastical Pushmi-Pullyu, which he immortalized in “The Story of Doctor Doolittle,” QNX’s game plan is to work the problem from both ends. QNX of course wants to allow partners and customers to view source code, but to also wants to build working open source community on top of that, in which the QNX development process itself is made visible to these partners and customers.

Much like Microsoft, QNX wants to tear down the API wall that slows 3rd party ISV innovation. But with QNX’s approach to open source, these 3rd parties aren’t just in read-only mode with the QNX Neutrino RTOS. As with true open source programs, QNX Neutrino developers will be coding in the open — a terrifying proposition when you consider how most closed source code is documented: poorly or not for public consumption. All of their source code changes will be made in real time and distributed to QNX community members, who can post bug fixes, submit their own code or just ask questions.

One thing to bear in mind here is that the QNX approach isn’t true open source, as its license does not allow external parties to redistribute the QNX code underneath their own value add. They can do that, of course, but they’ll need to negotiate an appropriate (financially speaking) contract with QNX to do that. Conversely, a customer can synchronize source code privately on the QNX community site or submit those modifications back to QNX, which will then own that intellectual property and can distribute those modifications along with the rest of the QNX Neutrino kernel.

Still, for 3rd party ISVs, who depend upon QNX, this approach should serve as a productivity boon, since they’ll no longer have to weed their way through a thicket of API calls. Cisco developers, in creating a kernel driver, can now look directly at the stack source to find and debug problems. And for QNX, this will let the company focus its efforts on the core of their product. They’re hoping to cut down on coding lower priority elements that normally hold up production, offloading much of that work through cooperative development with OEM partners.

As Lofting said:

Men get most of their animals by sneaking up behind them while they are not looking. But you could not do this with the pushmi-pullyu–because, no matter which way you came towards him, he was always facing you. And besides, only one half of him slept at a time. The other head was always awake–and watching. This was why they were never caught and never seen in Zoos.

QNX’s true, bi-directional visibility will allow the company to stay awake at both ends, as it were, pulling from OEM partners and pushing to a broader community. It will certainly accelerate development efforts within the company’s ISV community, though I doubt it will capture the imagination of hackers and enthusiasts in the same vein as Linux, Apache and Mozilla. But that’s ok. Hopefully we’ll run into more interesting examples of closed source vendors plying open source ideas in the future. QNX is further proof that the open source “ideal” of transparency is a relevant and powerful framework that can be successfully mapped onto a complete bestiary of business models.