%0 Journal Article %J Open Source Business Resource %D 2007 %T QNX Hybrid Software Model %A Lawrence Rosen %X QNX Software Systems' new software model integrates open source and proprietary software products in new ways. It is a step forward in the embedded systems market toward openness and freedom of software development, and it gives QNX customers significantly greater flexibility to extend and adapt QNX technology for their own purposes. The new QNX model is an effort to address fundamental problems in the way proprietary embedded software is traditionally developed and distributed. Today, the rate of change to software and hardware is so rapid, and software so complex, that vendors and customers alike struggle to keep up. Often, software vendors are their own worst bottleneck, as they work to fix or extend their existing products while also attempting to satisfy new, and often divergent, customer needs. Meanwhile, the sophisticated users and customers in the embedded market often know exactly what features and functions they want; many would make the modifications themselves if allowed to do so. And many of them would welcome opportunities to cooperate and share the results of their collective development efforts, just as they would in an open source project. A pure open source approach doesn't work in all cases, and it doesn't work for QNX which does not believe that relinquishing all control over their intellectual property and giving it away for free would best serve the interests of their customers. %B Open Source Business Resource %I Talent First Network %C Ottawa %8 10/2007 %G eng %U http://timreview.ca/article/63 %N October 2007 %9 Articles %1 Rosenlaw and Einschlag Lawrence Rosen is a founding partner of Rosenlaw and Einschlag, a technology law firm that specializes in intellectual property protection, licensing, and business transactions for technology companies. Larry served as general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and currently advises commercial open source companies and non-profit open source projects, including the Apache Software Foundation. His book, Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law, was published by Prentice Hall in 2004.