RIM is back and moving to Open Source

Last weekend I bought a RIM PlayBook at Mediamarkt for only 189,00€ to get some an impression of the new Blackberry OS. The kernel is bases on QNX a realtime, POSIX compliant operating system, which is based on a microkernel architecture (yes Microsoft, POSIX has won: Linux, MacOS, QNX, ...). QNX is very robust and used in a lot of different industrial realtime environments and CISCOs high availibility edition of IOS. QNX was aquired by RIM some in 2010, the source code is available, but not under an open source license (yet).

RIM obiously morphes to an open source friendly company. They started several projects on github and hired an open source veteran Eduardo Pelegi-Llopart. He was responsible for several open source projects at Sun like Glasfish and is member of the advisory board of CloudBees, the new company of Sacha Labourey. I hope to see him next week after visiting the OSBC 2012 (www.osbc.com) in SFO.

Back to the PlayBook impressions. I think the new RIM tablet os is an intersting alternative to Apple platform if you need a secure platform which is based on industrie standards. RIM supports Flash, Adobe AIR, HTML5, Qt and QML, JavaScript, and a new UI framework called Cascades (Video). The funny thing about that is, that RIMs leverages NOKIAs investments in Qt. Games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are alreay available, the Unity enginge will be supported soon. I hope to see official Mono support from my friends at Xamarin aswell.