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Petition To Get OS/2 Open Source
Landreth writes "There is currently an ongoing petition taking place at OS2 World to get IBM to open source either the whole part or parts of OS/2 to the community. I would highly encourage the Linux community to take part of this open source petition as well due to the fact there are lots of interesting code base the they could benefit from. To sign the petition: http://www.os2world.com/petition/" Despite the jokes about it, there was some good stuff in OS/2; however, I'd rank the ability to open it up fairly low, since I suspect there's a fair amount of legal restrictions on elements of the code.
I've got to say - even if 40% of OS2 is opened up, the benefits to many, many projects could be wide-spread. Further, history shows that IBM is likely to use a GNU compatible license if they open the source at all.
They obviously need more names. Posting it here though will make a nightmare for those who need to clean up the petition.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Lets not forget that OS/2 was jointly developed by IBM and Microsoft and no doubt Microsoft still has significant rights to large portions of the code base. I find it very unlikely that they would let IBM release the code even if IBM wanted to.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Just getting the Workplace Shell and the OOUI would be great; I'm sure a lot of the kernel internals would no longer be an advancement!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
OS/2 has a Windows (3.1) compatability layer which uses a lot of DLL code given to them under agreement back in the early 90's. There's your roadblock. (or your target...)
Just drop acid, already, and invent something better... or quit your whining.
From the summary:
:-)
I would highly encourage the Linux community to take part of this open source petition as well due to the fact there are lots of interesting code base the they could benefit from.
Please remember Linux isn't the only player in the F/OSS world, there are several huge communities, too (although rumor has it they are dying, or something), and the entire open source community might benefit from this.
Given that OS/2 is in a good many cash machines/ATMs, I wouldn't be surprised if there are contractural problems with opening the code up. Security through obscurity and all that.
There was a version of OS/2 Warp which didn't include Windows -- it took advantage of the Windows 3.1 installation you already had on your computer. I think it was 'OS/2 for Windows' or 'Warp for Windows'. It came in a red box, to distinguish it from the 'full' version that came in a blue box. It was also less expensive.
If I remember, not long after Warp For Windows came out, Microsoft came out with Windows 3.11 which fixed a few bugs in 3.1. Oddly enough, it didn't work with OS/2 for Windows. I'm surprised they missed that one. <G>
As far as aGUI based alternative to Linux/BSD, check out ReactOS,/A>. They've made a good eal of progress and I think they will be what some people are looking for in a few years: a free Win32 alternative.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If you have any such magic bits of code, you're better off going after suckers that paid off SCO like this mircosoft partner or even better these guys who seem to make it a political statement to pay off anyone who threatens anyone with IP (probably at the bidding of their new master who bought them for $2B).
This is not historically accurate. OS/2 was, originally, a joint project between Microsoft and IBM. It was intended to be THE 32-bit protect-mode operating system of the future for Intel PCs, both client and server. Windows 95 was a continuation of the 16-bit Windows code base. They were developed by separate groups within Microsoft. There was no constraint placed on OS/2 by the Windows dev team, originally. I'm talking about the OS/2 1.0/1.1/1.2 days. After OS/2 1.2, the split happened, and IBM went on to ship 1.3 and 2.0. 2.0 was IBM's first attempt to "go it alone" and compete with Microsoft for the business, and even consumer, operating system market. However, OS/2 was crippled by (a) IBM's lack of ability to sign reasonable OEM contracts with PC manufacturers (including IBM itself!) and (b) IBM's lack of any traction or marketing agility in the consumer and small business space, for both end users and, especially, developers/software vendors.
BTW I currently work for IBM and was one of the key development managers and tech leads for OS/2 subsystems in those days.
Personally, I don't think IBM or Microsoft cares what happends to the code, its outdated. I think they wouldn't mind it becomming open source.
In soviet Russia, Linux compiles YOU!
Sure, it's probably not going to happen, for all the reasons you list. But there's technology in OS/2 that has yet to be duplicated in other operating systems. And like most IBM inventions, it's going to fade into history, forgotten and unused. I'd really like to see what free software developers could do if the workplace shell landed in their lap.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
They sold it off to another company some time ago who currently supports it, and develops new versions.. ( estation, or somethign like that )
Unless something has changed in the last year or so..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If they had hammered a deal to do this with MS back at the time of Warp 4, back when Stardock was still supporting OS/2, it might have gone somewhere and given us essentially three competing systems: Win, Linux, OS/2. Instead, IBM could not find their rear ends with a hunting dog and a copy of Gray's Anatomy, kept with the single worst GUI design this side of the Amiga, and decided obfuscation and counterintuitiveness was superior to ease of use and common sense.
That said, it would be nice to see, but way late. We should be at Warp 7 by now. I doubt the OS/2 fanatics will be able to sufficiently play catch-up even if Redmond is open to open sourcing the thing given how many went to Windows or Linux or both. They ain't getting younger and doing an about face in your coding mindset like that might cause a bump in the number of programmers seeking professional psychiatric help.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Another thing I miss was OS/2's awesome DOS VDM support. Most of my DOS games played perfectly under OS/2, and through the dummy DOS sound driver could even access the soundcard. I was mightily disappointed when I started playing around with NT 4.0 that it couldn't, and neither could Win2k. I have no idea whether WinXP can, though there is a third party driver that does allow DOS VDM sessions to access the sound hardware. Still, pretty pathetic.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If I recall correctly... OS/2 was used by IBM as the foundation for the S390 emulator software they use as the foundation platform on which they run the Z/OS or S/390 enviornment. This runs their current crop of mainframes. The Mainframe Market is small these days comapred to the past, but there are still organizations that use "Big Iron".
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
OpenVMS is not open source. It's simply what DEC called VMS in its later years, to signify an open-system, not an open source base. In other words, it supported open standards such as POSIX and Unix compatability, as well as TCP/IP networking, instead of the proprietary systems it used to support.
There is a project by the name of FreeVMS, but it's not anywhere close to being done, and it's pretty much stagnant now.
-twb
What this guy said is %100 true and Microsoft even paid SCO additional money to keep the lights on at SCO after they paid an outrageous sum of money for unix rights that they dont need.
Sun too reacted sharply and even critizied linux and mentioned solaris as an excellant alternative. its a fact!
Back on subject....
Microsoft was a core partner with IBM and I even think Microsoft released its own OS/2 version to developers back in the early 90's but never commercially distributed. You can google it if anyone is interested in.
Microsoft more than likely contributed alot of code to IBM and probably owns some percentage of the product.
Remember OS2/NT became WindowsNT after Bill Gates decided to go with their own product.
Microsoft would love to prevent OS/2 from ever going opensource and unlike the SCO case, Microsoft would have a good argument and would probably win.
Doesn't Microsoft also own some unix code from Xenix? I believe some of it ended up in SysV or unixware which is why Novell can not opensource it. MS would probably sue them.
http://saveie6.com/
Considering this product is still being sold as eComStation, I don't think we'll be seeing an open source version from IBM any time soon...
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
In fact, someone forgot to lock an inside key after collecting the previous day money (those machines accept both cards and coins for payment).
The crash was in fact a security ! But seeing about 15 screens goes blank at once is a wonderful sight, indeed (those machines have since been replaced by new, windows powered ones, which routinely go BSOD, but only one at a time)!
I did use OS/2 Warp a bit. Nice stuff under the hood, but frankly I expect that no one will get a radically new concept out of it.
Now, talk about Lotus Improv !
(See also http://www.oreillynet.com/timo.html)
This was a revolutionary spreadsheet concept. Was it actually even to be called a spreadsheet anymore?
Anyway, too new so not popular so dead in the commercial world.
I bet that, as free software, it would have been a killer app (you know, the application that will make free software attractive even to patent lawyers - what kills their jobs - what kills them - hence the name "killer app"), developped and maintained because enough people would love the concept and make it live throughout from childhood to adulthood.
Until the code is erased from all sources, this can still happen.
So, IBM/Lotus, please release the code of Improv (and OS/2) to the people who will make it live.
(Actually, the good thing is that, anyway, someone could make it anyway from scratch, but why reinvent the wheel?)
It's been reported many moons ago the most Automatic Tell Machines (ATM's) use OS/2 as the base platform. I've seen more than one ATM being serviced and seen very OS/2 like screens with diagnostic info.
Do *you* want every 133t h@x0r out there with source code to your neighborhood ATM? If the bank hasn't bothered to move off OS/2, what are the odds they'll patch any holes found by white/grey/black hats?
-MrLogic
I mean, yes that was very cool (and windows and KDE and Gnome *still* don't do that) but also printing. How many times did I drag a document over the windows printer icon and have the damn word processor open and load the document before it printed? That didn't happen in OS/2. You could change the way folders worked, to the point of setting them up as individual, unique workspaces -- a poor man's virtual desktop, really. You could associate files with programs on the fly with greater precision than is possible today (to the point where I could set it up so that a specific gif defaulted to loading one program while all other gifs defaulted to loading another program).
There was the famous "drag web pages off of your browser and store them in a folder on your desktop" trick. That might be possible with other OS's now, I dunno.
Shadows of icons would automatically maintain their links to actual programs, even if you dragged the program folder to another directory.
I really can't do it justice -- I never understood the technology well enough to do it justice -- but essentially the workplace shell was a huge folder that opened up, and everything in the UI was a subclass of that folder, and they all "knew" how to work together depending on what you did with them.
Like I said, I really can't do it justice.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Agreed. I for one run Ecomstation as a viable Internet alternative cuz who writes virii for Warped? It's fast, comfortable (for me, who has been involved since the very early 90's) and robust as heck. If you want a viable alternative, sans bells and whistles, this is it. But I agree with the above post..., the ecomstation site (and all of us other propeller heads) paid for it/run it. To tell the truth, I wouldn't be too upset. As much as linux would benefit, so would OS/2. my 2 pennies
As stated a couple of times by others, NT started with a codebase for what was supposed to be portable OS/2 or OS/2 NT. Microsoft got that code and the orignal 16bit OS/2 when they walked out on IBM. I don't think its known how much implementation code went into NT but the 16bit OS/2 was in there and it was used to give NT its networking system when NT v1.0( called v3.1 ) shipped.
It does seem that IBM did not do a good job at getting full rights to the code it kept. Supposedly, OS/2 v2.0( the first 32bit OS/2 ) was a rewrite of the 16bit Microsoft code though Microsoft license text always showed up in OS/2.
I've also heard that much of OS/2's kernel is assembly code. OS/2 for the PowerPC was/is portable C code IIRC. But that was pretty slow from what I saw at the 1994 COMDEX show.
What was really lost in the battle with Microsoft was the OpenDoc and WorkplaceShell. Multiple LIVE embeddable objects and "parts"( components ) with non-rectangular window frames were pretty cool. Unfortunately, many didn't recognize what it ment to have more than one embedded "part" live/running in a single document. Those technologies moving forward with Moore's Law, would have had a profound positive impact on the software industry and productivity. It also would have allowed open source projects/developers to compete with large software houses since applications would consist of smaller, replaceable "parts"/components.
IMO.
IIRC, IBM eventually open sourced OpenDoc and SOM but the industry was going nuts over JAVA at that time. Actually, Warp 4.0 and the Apple Mac OS (?) shipped with OpenDoc. Apples CyberDog web browser was an OpenDoc container. Oh, the Bento Filesystem was pretty cool too. It allowed different "parts", or components, to save there data in one file. Kinda like a filesystem within a file but with a ton of APIs for accessing the data in a protected way. These things would have changed how we interact with our DATA on computers. Instead, we still interact with our DATA( a file ) by thinking about the application that's tied to the DATA. OpenDoc enabled mixing of data in a file so you'd open a file based on its rich content instead of saying your "opening an Excel file", or "opening a Word file. These are the things which that kept Bill and Steve up at night. Netscape( the browser ) was/is a shell of what OpenDoc was but it brought about the same kind of attacks from Microsoft.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
OS/2 always got hammered because it needed 16MB to be comfortable and those days a server usually had 8MB. I had 8 and I was running a BBS on my PC. It was significantly smoother, never dropped a single package over the modem while I was working on my CAD software (which alone used over 8MB of RAM), constantly swapping in and out. Win3.1 even couldn't handle me moving the mouse with a user downloading. Win95 wasn't an improvement.
Most of the Win95 and OS/2 users were single-task users. It really showed its power when you used it as a server or a real multi-task environment. Later on I ran MUDs and httpd daemons on it and it always performed faster than anything Microsoft could supply. The lack of graphics card driver support really doesn't matter if you are content with a VGA screen, who needs graphics on servers in any case?
Where it failed is the developers. Steve Balmer wasn't shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!" for no reason. IBM's expensive compilers and other suppliers' (i.e., Borland) lack of commitment effectively what killed OS/2. There was a limit on what you really wanted to do with gcc.
It's great work, but it does have a smell of insincerity.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.