> Large automotive companies have built huge systems on top of QNX
    > messages, creating large libraries used by their applications.
    > They would like to be able to use those libraries 
    > on Linux, but often don't know that there is
    > a way to get the QNX message API for Linux. It is called SIMPL
    > and it works well.

(from the LWN article)

And the reason this is more prevalent on QNX is that it's a microkernel based platform. Here, in Linux, there's the debate what should be allowed into the kernel, whereas that question is pretty much never asked for QNX. You also don't get discussions about circumventing the kernel network stack to avoid context switches, to name a prominent example. Microkernels also lend themselves better to multikernel designs where you aim to make better use of all the available cpu cores by reducing sharing.

It's a shame that QNX is dying inside Blackberry. If there's one project I would love to see open sourced, it is QNX.

They tried to open it for a short period, I remember getting the sources and playing with it:

http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_2471_1.html

And now I notice it was almost ten years ago! Nevertheless, too little too late...