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We all know hybrid microkernels will rule the world, and monokernels will became second class citizen !!!! This is why OS/2 Warp will rule the world !!!! http://www.os2world.com/

We are still trying to get more funds for OS/2 Warp :) http://www.os2world.com/

We all know it is the future. http://www.os2world.com/wiki/i... (looking for crazy open source developers to clone Presentation Manager)

OS/2 installation never decay as Windows. It is all on the config.sys, you simple delete all the stuff you don't like and it is done. http://www.os2world.com./

osFree (http://www.osfree.org/) was having a god moment some years ago, but sadly we lack developers to continue the project.

What I think that it will be interesting is trying to clone the close source components that runs on top of OS/2 Warp like WPS, SOM and PM.
- Presentation Manager - http://www.osfree.org/
- SOM - https://sourceforge.net/projec...
- WPS - XWorkplace and other OSS WPS classes

I think we should focus first in only one component that can run over OS/2 Warp 4.5x or eCS to later continue and gain momentum for the rest.

The community stills hangs out at http://www.os2world.com/

There is a OEM version of OS/2 called eComStation, which has ACPI, AHCI and some updated drivers to run on newer hardware. But it is not like the company behind eCS covers all the needs for the platform and community.

I think that OS/2 also deserves a shot on trying to be cloned and have an opportunity in the open source community. Sadly we don't have the resources to do this, but we need to build up a team of interested developers and supporters to do this.

This site, http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/, still runs on OS/2, many others can be found at http://www.os2world.com/

When IBM killed OS/2 there was tremendous pressure for the company to open source the operating system. At the time, the vast majority of the banking industry ATM machines ran on OS/2. After doing some analysis IBM concluded they simply could not open source the operating system. Not because they didn't want to but because of all the 3rd party licensed technology embedded in the system that IBM did not own. Without agreements from these 3rd parties IBM concluded it was not a legal option for them to publish the source code. Even today there is pressure on IBM to open source OS/2. Conversely, one could also concluded the company has no upside to open sourcing. It would take a tremendous amount of legal and technical experience, time, and money to get all the agreements in place to put such a system in the open source domain. I would argue this would be a great treasure for researchers as well as computer scientists as well as corporate customers but IBM has different ideas. Likewise, other complex systems also are bound to many different patent and 3rd party agreements as well as internal propensity to keep secrets in house. http://www.os2world.com/content/view/16595/1/

I guess you've never seen eComStation run on modern hardware. It's damn fast. I've always considered getting a copy, but I've stuck with Linux rather than spending the hundreds of dollars per seat.

OS/2 fans have been petitioning IBM to either start selling new versions of OS/2 again directly or to open-source it for a long time. There are parts IBM simply doesn't own, including parts still owned at least in part by Microsoft. Getting those as FOSS is pretty doubtful.

If IBM can bring the SOM, the WPS, and some other things to a layer on top of Linux, that will be a nice environment. If they make it all Free or even Open Source, then many OS/2 fans (including me) will flock to at least try it.

If I could get a Linux distro with the usual open-source stack (glibc, glib, qt, gtk, perl, python, etc) that will run all my Linux apps along with OS/2 apps on top of OS/2 services for Linux all in WPS for an interface without some sort of emulator or virtual machine, I'd probably have that distro on half my machines by the end of the week it was released.

Ya know if running Linux wasn't like ramming white hot pokers in your eyes then Microsoft might have some competition.
It's not as polished as Windows (which is REALLY sad).
It's like the little kid who's welfare mom told him that homemade clothes are more special than store bought..and all the other kids beat up.

Linux is just full of things that are more effort.
On a superior OS things would be less effort and have fewer compatibility issues.
OSes that have superior abilities but are irritating to install, cause incompatibility errors and won't run the software you want easily are a FAIL (i.e. the OS/2 losers)
Installing drivers are a massive FAIL.
Installing software is a massive FAIL.

The average user doesn't read dialog boxes..and you want them to read man pages..riiiight..keep holding your breath.

The media science behind Linux is simply wrong. It's a visual object in a tactile environment.

I have never met a Linux head that doesn't spend more time screwing around with their OS than actually doing productive work.

Just like all the OS/2 losers I'm going have people arguing every little point..I will laugh last because I heard it all before from arrogant OS/2 geeks.

I'm just wondering how many of you are going to hang on long after the party has ended like these losers http://www.os2world.com/

Yeah my OS sucks but I can get stuff done AND THAT'S WHERE THE CULTURE IS.

Yeah the ironic thing was that Apple already had an MKLinux port for their Macintosh systems, and all they really needed to do was integrate the Mac OS GUI with MKLinux and then just use the OpenStep enhancements because they too are open sourced like MKLinux and could have saved the money they used to buy out Next and bring Steve Jobs back and just do it all better by themselves.

Instead they got Steve Jobs and Next and a much more bigger and bloated operating system than they expected to get.

The other option, besides buying up Be Inc. was to license AROS and then build Carbon and Mac OS systems on top of that as it is already object oriented and based on the AmigaOS that IBM licensed from Commodore to give OS/2 2.0 an object oriented WPS system as Commodore got there already in 1985 before anyone else did, and Apple was basically doing the same thing with OSX that Commodore did with AmigaDOS/Workbench in 1985.

The Amiga was already object oriented even going back to its 1970's roots as the Atari Lorianne project that was basically an Atari 2600 mod to turn the Atari 2600 into an object oriented GUI computer, but the Atari 400/800 projects put Lorianne on the back burner until Commodore bought out the team in the 1980's. The Amiga project predated the Apple Lisa project, and the Lorianne/Amiga team offered Apple to buy them out first, but gave Steve Jobs his idea for the Lisa computer (and later the Macintosh) and he told them no, and visited Xerox's PARC to get some more good ideas.

A lot of people have faith in Sergey Brin's corporate motto. The creation of class B stock at Google, which gives Sergey and Larry ten votes for every share, ensures that they will be able to keep Google from being corrupted, so long as they themselves remain uncorrupt.

Microsoft has no such public image. They were found to use their monopolist position to kill Navigator and hurt Java. Their CEO is belligerent and takes shots at the FOSS community. More recently they've tried to buy the ISO vote for OOXML. They don't trust their own customers, as evidenced by periodic, rude and disruptive Genuine Advantage challenges.

We're about to enjoy a big, fat, open class C block in the US spectrum, courtesy of Google. They purchased Android, and then opened its SDK to the world. In contrast, Microsoft has promoted hardware restrictions, media restrictions, and discourages use of unemcumbered codecs such as Ogg Vorbis.

Which company would you rather do business with, all things being equal? That is Microsoft's problem. They can spend all the $billions they like on buying market share... but they can't buy a reputation. When the FTC clears the Yahoo deal... Microsoft will still be Microsoft.

(I'm one of the people involved in this petition - one of the reviewers before it was sent)

You are very close to the truth - much of the wording comes from IBM's standard policy regarding OS/2 which could be found on their website. Basically, the response was the legal statement (which primarily echo'd our statements regarding understanding that certain parts could not be released OS because of such matters), followed by the standard "Help your customers migrate, or tell them to contact us for such help or for defect support, but we plan no further enhancements" (paraphrased).

The situation as we believe it stands, is simply that IBM is not willing to spend the time (ie: MONEY) to dig through the code to determine which pieces of code are free of any restrictions to allow them to release it.

Certain components like JFS were easy since they were from AIX (then ported to OS/2, then ported to Linux) and REXX (which was ported to/created for virtually every IBM OS. The rest (the important ones) are intermingled with code tied up by various copyright agreements and cross-code sharing agreements. The easier thing to do would be for them to Open Source the PPC code, which was much less reliant on either 3rd party code - and/or - not covered by technology sharing agreements with other companies (ie: Microsoft). An excellent kernel, and better implementation of the WPS would be the result - but we in the OS/2 World are coming to the conclusions that (a) they don't know where that code is (and it wouldnt be the first chunks of code they lost), (b) digging it up and providing it would cost more money than they are willing to spend (which is nothing - and they have already spent a lot of money in porting ideas - if not code - from the OS/2 kernel for the benefit of the Linux scheduler) and/or (c) the people at IBM who responded are unaware of the technical, legal and other differences between OS/2 PPC and OS/2 Intel (much less the existance of OS/2 PPC).

Anyone who wants to read the original PDF can check out www.OS2World.com - once it's no longer slashdotted (just keep hitting reload - it will come up... the relevant link is here: http://www.os2world.com/content/view/16595/2/

RTFA (like the submitter didn't), it was 23, not 20. Summary is incorrect.
Link from the summary: http://www.os2world.com/content/view/14868/1/
So it woulda been 2-6-3

BTW, most means 50.0000001% (insert more zeros after the . if you like)
so even a single vote differance is "most"

But, 8 out of 10 votes not voting yes sure seems to me to be "most" in anyones book.

And a late entry:

OS/2 Chess

Quality hardware and software is not that expensive. It only costs a little more. For example ECC memory. Why are so many paying for glitz while scrimping on the important stuff.

I encourage others to switch to eComStation on good hardware. Join other eComStation users

http://www.os2voice.org/
http://www.os2world.com/

eComStation, much more stable and secure than windows yet much easier than Linux.

I finally found good hardware at a place that would pre-load my preferred OS, eComStation.

The vendor's web site is real basic because he puts his time and money in have the best product.

For Christmas I bought a system from CSS.
http://www.curtissystemssoftware.com/preloads.htm

It came preloaded with a OpenOffice.org. Has quality hardware (instead of the Dell's lowest bidder components). Even had ECC memory

Even with out anti-virus software it is immune to all the windows virus/trojan/worms/.. crap. I also don't have to worry about the vendor shutting down my OS or apps remotely in the future.

I am just a user but there is a GCC compiler. I think the eComStation-OS/2 version of Mozilla/Firefox uses GCC. I think there is developer stuff on the eComStation CD. Many developers use Open Watcom.

Programming forum
http://www.os2world.com/cgi-bin/forum/UltraBoard.c gi?action=Headlines&BID=60&SID=1p4zzqyDu4zGR2hs

InnoTek GCC for OS/2 (free download)
http://www.innotek.de/index.php?option=com_content &task=view&id=23&Itemid=40

Developer project site
http://netlabs.org/en/site/index.xml

If you say so...

If you say so...

I think it's worth pointing out this petition over at OS2World.com (which is still accepting signatures), asking IBM to release the source of OS/2.

There are apparently some legal issues -- the most frequently cited one is that IBM might not hold copyright to all the code, since the project was originally done in collaboration with Microsoft and Corel -- but the request is that IBM open up all of the code that it has available and can legally release, and note what parts it can't, so that they could be re-implemented.

I'm not sure it's ever going to happen, but it sure would be nice if it did.

Other than some parts of IIS, the TabletPC, Microsoft Bob and IntelliSense and that rolly thing on those IntelliMice, what else is there?

COM - rip off of IBM's SOM (System Object Model)

Money - there were several DOS based checkbook programs for DOS at the time Money was released

Internet Explorer - wonder why your browser returns "Mozilla?" and has a blub in help->about you see something about "developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

Outlook - email clients not much of an innovation these days

Windows NT - this was originally going to be OS/2 3.0, until the API was ripped out and replaced with the Windows API at the last minute (however the kernels between NT3 and OS/2 2.x were amazingly similar)

Explorer - after Program Manager bombed, surprisingly Microsoft created something that felt and acted quite a bit like OS/2's Presentation Manager

Word - go see Xerox

Excel - go see VisiCalc

SQL Server - we all know that was Sybase

WindowsCE - *sigh* Palm and countless others

BizTalk - see Gentran

FrontPage - see those _vti folders in IIS? That stands for Vermeer Technologies, Inc.

In fact, if you look at the long history of Microsoft products, you really don't see that much grand innovation anywhere. In fact, the big moneymakers at Microsoft AREN'T the items they've dreamed up completely by themselves and rightly-so.

Why spend a lot of capital to invent something that probably won't be successful, when you can buy a small fry that obviously does have lots of potential and go for the patents and quash the competitition with your marketing?

It's America. What's wrong with it?

My 12yo, who's been saving her babysitting money for a laptop, has been using/abusing computers since she was 2. In fact, to deal with her curiousity at that time, I wrote the first and probably only key mashing game for OS/2! Now ten years later, I think the main reason she wants a laptop is to have some of her own private space. Currently we have a desktop system that she shares with her brothers and sister. She has her own account on this Win2K box, but the kids machine is located in a very public area of the house. We've talked to her about things to avoid on the internet, etc., so I'm not too worried about her getting into any trouble if she's working in her bedroom. Still it isn't easy, but part of raising kids is giving them some of their own space and eventually having to let them go.

There are currently only 9861 signed. Please all go and sign
To IBM:
What ever you cannot release Just leave closed, or absent. Have the Interface well defined, the community will work around these quickly with alternatives. Open what you can, even if first version doesn't even boot, Release it. We'll fix it fast

Free life
Boaz

Sign the petition at:
http://www.os2world.com/petition

It's too bad that Microsoft owns so much of OS/2. It would be great to see it released as Open Source. The Open Source OS/2 Petition is a good start.

When checking the Danish newspaper Børsen it also mention that Microsoft layers, Marianne Wier, was the one who they quoted and one would now wonder how long she will stay at Microsoft Denmark. So it turns out that this wasn't that great of deal for the Navision and Damgaard people after all according to this article.

...TL were suing developers for building products with MS SQL and TL's patented and copywritten code because MS hadn't paid Timeline to redistribute it as they were and neither had the developers. MS told the developers that they had paid for full redistribution rights.

Perhaps this is more of the same - MS is telling people that they're all paid up when IRL it may not be so ("the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away").

Either way, if you recompile stolen code and use it on your systems, you're liable. OTOH, you have a great defence in that you didn't know it was stolen, which kind of pushes the warranty back on the developers claiming ownership of the stolen code.

OTGH, for purposes of suing people into the ground and establishing precendents, a large suitor could attack (say) individual end-users of Gentoo for using the stolen code, deployers of Gentoo because they built it themselves using stolen parts, plus Gentoo as an orginisation for packaging the stolen parts in the first place, plus the authors who either did or endorsed the dirty deed of including stolen code in the original codebase. The immediate moral of the story is: don't steal.

TSG's lawsuit is like this, with one significant omission: there is no actual stolen code.

The problem is, as with TSG, the damage suffered and fear generated while the barratry is in progress. The authors responsible for the inclusion of stolen code are the only ones ultimately responsible. The people in between have no more duty-of-care than an MS developer or deployer or end user would would have.

The percieved value in what MS is offering is insulation from the pain of this barratry. The tinfoil hat brigade will, with some slight justification, go looking for evidence that MS teed TSG up for just this purpose, and in fact a number of FOSS luminaries claimed exactly that right at the start. Either way, it doesn't change the outcome.

The value MS is proposing is largely illusory, since even if the company is reimbursed after having to pay legal expenses and damages, it will still be massively inconvenienced, out of pocket for internal stuff, and have suffered damage to its reputation.

Nevertheless, MS will make as much publicity hay as they can while the legal sun shines. What we should be doing is exactly the same thing (not teeing up devious FUD plans, but asking the emperor where his clothes are and pointing out stuff like the relative impossibility of even finding most FOSS users compared with (say) subpoenaing a customer register or accounts from MS, McAfee or Adobe - a licensing yoke which doesn't appear on many TCO/ROI studies).

Well, one can also ask how many will we actually see... since the military has already started to complain about the hotspot zones are disturbin their radio equitment.... Goto OS2 Dudez HomeZone ....

For more information on running DOS games under OS/2, see http://www.os2world.com/games/.

There are two versions of OS/2 available now, IBM's (called the Convenience Pack), and eComStation. eCS is better choice for the end-user. And thanks to Project Odin and VirtualPC for OS/2, you can also run tons of Windows software (more than Wine will). Plus, lots of Linux apps have been ported to OS/2, like XFree86, Gimp, Apache, and so on. In fact, I think OS/2 now runs more apps than any other OS. Plus, it makes a great desktop OS with it's powerful and easy-to-use WorkPlace Shell user interface.