From what people reported around the rugpull, BB pretty much nuked all customer relationships with various groups that had commercial licenses too, not just with people who looked into open source or free-as-in-beer options.
Greatly accelerated AGL with D-Bus (yuck) as patchwork replacement for QNX IPC
Some of the older autonomous challenges involving flight I remember a lot of contestants had QNX on board vs. let's say VxWorks or others.
I also guess QNX having more point-to-point IPC/RPC fits some stuff better without having to plop in (possibly expensive) middleware like CORBA-RT
The way that IPC/RPC worked across the network was the real power of QNX and a very much under appreciated aspect of it. SUN microsystems had this slogan: "The Network Is The Computer". But they never really delivered on that QNX, Erlang and Plan9 actually did.
Yes, this happened to us as well. It basically killed more than a decade of development. I did write a send/receive/reply/name_attach/name_locate library for Linux, which worked well enough that we could at least rescue the project. But BB killed QnX for large scale software development projects outside of the embedded space, and quite possibly for a lot of those as well (but I had no contact with such groups). There was a point in time where QnX ran a very large fraction of all of the world's infrastructure and BB showed the dangers of relying on a company that never fully committed to their long-term strategy.