Perhaps I should expand the history, for those who don't know. In the early 80s, QNX was the first fully multitasking operating system available for the IBM PC

Perhaps I should expand the history, for those who don't know. In the early 80s, QNX was the first fully multitasking operating system available for the IBM PC architecture. It was small, efficient, real-time, and somewhat idiosyncratic. It was fully ten years ahead of its time. At the same time, in another sphere, POSIX was shaping up as factor in the emerging Open Systems wars. It drove compatibility between big vendors like IBM and HP and Sun (over other idiosyncratic offerings, like Apollo). Perhaps POSIX as a user response to corporate power had value, but there was also collateral damage. As I understand the story, Canadian colleges standardized on POSIX, and so a great little Canadian OS (QNX) was left out in the cold. They had to become like others to survive. Conformity served to reduce innovation and developer choice. Now fast forward to 2013, and leaving aside shared memory details, what is POSIX driving today? Don't forget that ultimately a non-POSIX OS killed them all. And don't forget that users have their own means of bubbling up new features and architectures in the Open Source projects. Their control is far beyond what users got out of POSIX in the Open Systems age.