If I may ask, I'm very curious (and I suspect others may also be interested in this datapoint) - what sort of ballpark......? And what were you requesting?
Also, I have to admit that I'm unsure what you mean by "'randomware' style buy-out" - the only definition of ransomware I'm finding on Google (searching for "randomware buyout", heheh) throws back info about malware. I'm not as well-versed in business to be able to intuit what you're getting at there :)
You've probably noticed that I also replied to your top-level comment.
> If I may ask, I'm very curious (and I suspect others may also be interested in this datapoint) - what sort of ballpark......?
Well, you already supplied a number. I figured since they had not done QNX any favors they should be happy with a bit of a discount, especially because I did not care for the branding.
> And what were you requesting?
Open source the complete OS as it was available at that time, without the brand. Perpetual license (they'd already done a release-and-retract once before). Other deal parameters to be negotiated.
Anyway, as it is I strongly suspect that QNX will go under with BB at some point, or that it will get sold to the highest bidder in some kind of bankruptcy proceedings. Which likely will be quite a bit cheaper :)
I already wrote one QNX clone for 32 bits, it should not be too hard to make another for 64 bit mode and it would be a lot cheaper too so maybe that's a better way to go about it. It really isn't all that difficult, the fact that it starts off with an extremely simple kernel makes the whole problem far more tractable than it would be for a comparable macro kernel, the scope that needs inspecting to home in on a bug is a very small fraction of what you get with a macro kernel and if a device driver crashes you can simply inspect the core dump of that device driver.
And with VMs as a test bed that job got so much easier.
Very frustrating.
I completely share your sentiment and your vision.