Slashdot Mirror
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.
... you know IBM is going to have ten more lawsuits on their hands as various software copyright holders magically find bits of "their code" in the OS/2 source.
It taint gonna happen.
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
What are you crazy?! I mean I know OS/2 users are in denial, but geez this is INSANE!
I used in the early ninties, for it's day it was very nice. I think a Opensourced OS/2 would be a good alternative to Linux/BSD, for some folks who want a more gui driven system.... It never hurts to have options.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
What we need, is VMS open sourced. OS/2 might be interesting, but VMS would be useful. There's a difference. VMS has one of the best multitasking systems that's ever seen the light of day - a scheduler that works exceedingly well, and a VM system that blows everything on the market today out of the water.
IBM would probably have radical difficulties renegotiating a deal to open source code that originated in Redmond.
I fear this one is a nonstarter for legal reasons.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
IIRC, OS/2 (at least Warp) shipped with a complete install of MS-Win to provide dual-OS support. The OS/2 code contained lots of integration points--if these integration points relied on Win code provided as part of the infamous "divorce decree", that would presumably be off-limits without MS's blessing. If so, would there be enough "untainted" OS/2 code left to be useful as open source?
I didn't use later versions of OS/2, so I don't know if this chimera-like architecture was changed further on...
I honestly think that OS/2 would have made a much greater impact if it hadn't had such pathetic PR support. The OS itself was a surprsingly strong and reliable system, but their ad campaigns were mind-bogglingly pathetic.
I'm not sure what the Linux community could gain by it being open source, except maybe some more efficient/reliable algorythms. As such, it would be enough for the IBM written chunks to be open sourced - they don't need a complete, functional code base.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
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.
Why, you may ask?
There are still a number of financial institutions around the world that run on various versions of OS/2, both at the server and workstation level.
Also, as of about 5 years ago, CLI OS/2 powered approximately 85% of North America's Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), with a significant share worldwide as well.
I'm sure most of the companies still behind OS/2 are screaming at IBM not to release so much as a comment from the code.
"I don't get it." -- ObviousGuy
That even *some* of the code -- specifically the workplace shell -- can't be released as open source. The workplace shell was one of the most elegant and powerful user interfaces I've ever worked with. It wasn't always the most *attractive* interface -- not by default, at any rate -- but it was the only one I've ever used that ever "felt right" to me. I miss that. The phrase "drag and drop" simply didn't do it justice.
Anyway, I signed, but I'm afraid that 1) there's too much proprietary licensed code for the entire thing to be released, and 2) IBM has neither the patience nor the interest in doing the work necessary to separate what can be released from what can't be released. Which is a pity.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Maybe I'm way out in left field, but wouldn't open sourcing OS/2 open what would likely be a lot of Microsoft's NT code? Weren't OS/2 and NT once the same operating system? I wouldn't be surprised if there were still a bit of shared codebase.
:: OS/2 API.
Not quite.
OS/2 3.0 NT was supposed to be built from NT's codebase. Obviously, that didn't happen, and microsoft took their toys and went home and made Windows 3.1 NT.
There is significant evidence that NT 3.1 (and later) Windows 32-bit APIs were influenced by OS/2 's design. The WinScrollWindow api under OS/2 has exactly the same signature as ScrollWindowEx under Win32... The win16 api does not quite match. There are a large number of these close matches in the Win32 API
That being said, NT (and its derivatives) do not share code with OS/2 in implementation. (other than code that was inherited from OS/2 1.3 (ie: HPFS).
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
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.
exposure to other 'stuff' helps expand your horizons. being able to see the code behind os/2 would probably give a different perspective on an operating system.
there is something to be said for learning from others.
eric
There is no way this is going to happen. IBM would have nothing to gain, because they'd have to hire a whole of people to go through the code, figure out what's not protected by any IP (and OS/2 has a 20-year history, so that's a lot of possibile IP), and then release it in such a way as to make sure no one notices, since the last thing IBM wants these days is to bring attention to OS/2.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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
Writing a letter or calling IBM would be worth like 1,000 to 10,000 signatures because it tells people that you really want this, and you aren't just filling out the form many hundreds of times. If you really want to see it happen call IBM: 1-800-IBM-4YOU
This signature was left intentionally blank.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, the Windows GUI to this very day is a half-witted knock-off of OS/2's WPS. I'm not going to get into a war over whether MacOS's GUI is better than the old WPS, but it's pretty damn sad that Windows XP, when you look at it, has an inferior GUI to one developed a decade ago.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
And here's why.
IBM sold OS/2 off and it became eComStation ("jointly developed" - whatever). I highly doubt big blue has exclusive rights to the code anymore.
Go ahead and sign the petition, we all know how much weight internet petitions carry.
I, for one, would love to see both of these pan out. Unfortunately they probably won't.
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
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)
Except maybe for some of the very high level code (basically applications), you aren't just going to port some feature of OS/2 to *nix even if you have the code.
What would be nice would be a release of patents/copyrights covering concepts and technologies used in OS/2, such as the System Object Model concepts and the Workplace Shell. OS/2 had some nice ideas and it was a neat environment to work in. Bringing that environment to open source (or any other environment) would not be that much easier even if you had the source.
-Lod
Per that, is OS X 20 times the OS OS/2 will ever be? ;)
Ok i was close on the name but not exact...
http://www.ecomstation.com/
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Well, according to their web page, the ReactOS people actually plan an OS/2 subsystem. Therefore if IBM released the part of the OS/2 code which they can, it would probably be a big help.
BTW, if the OS/2 kernel code is too encumbered, even releasing the WPS alone could be a great thing. While it certainly lacked some features which modern desktops have, it had some other features which AFAIK are still not available on other systems (e.g. what was called "Arbeitsordner" in the German version; essentially a folder which managed its own "sub-session").
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A petition to make the OS OS2 OSS?
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/
Having developed device drivers for OS/2, I doubt there'd be that much interest in the OS/2 kernel or device drivers. Even in Warp, and OS/2 4.0, most of the device drivers were 16 bit since the device driver API was only 16 bit (except graphics drivers). I think maybe the only interesting parts would be the Workplace shell and SOM, though I wonder about the stability in today's complex environment, having remembered having issues of stability with the WPS when I loaded up all the software I ran.
There's also still a lot of Microsoft bits and pieces of code in there.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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.
What's OS/2? Like, half an operating system or something? :P
Careful with that joke, it's an antique.
Here come da fudge!
good old os/2 - so few people remember that Microsoft wrote it, basically under contract, for IBM.
but really, who would care? it was an OS of its time (around 1990), and certainly does not add value to the OS landscape today. if you want layering to interfere with the design of an OS, you need look no further than NT and followons. the rest of the universe has gone on (to linux).
yes, I did work on OS/2 (in Redmond long ago). I even have the tshirts to prove it (including one that elucidates that NT=new technology, and was originally a derivative of OS/2 for RISC chips...)
The enemy of my enemy is my friend - even if they're my enemy.
KFG
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
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
I would highly encourage the Linux community to take part of this open source petition
:)
Then what are you doing here? Everybody knows Slashdot is a Mac site now
RP
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.
I think the DOSEMU and DOSBOX projects could derive some serious benefit from OS/2's MVDM technology, for example, and there are a number of concepts in the OS/2 WorkPlace Shell which might be encumbered by NeXT licensing or something but not MS, and which both KDE and GNOME could benefit from.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
It's great work, but it does have a smell of insincerity.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
They shipped copies of it for a long time, in fact.
;-)
Here is the launch announcement. Microsoft shipped versions 1.0-1.3, but did not ship beyond that point as the MS/IBM divorce happened around then, culminating with IBM OS/2 2.0.
HEre are some screenshots. Note that the WLO libraries were apparently included in a product called the "Microsoft OS/2 Software Migration Kit". If one were to have a copy of Microsoft Systems Journal November 1990 -- Vol 5 No 6 then one would have record of this product, which has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.
I had a shrinkwrapped copy in my hands when I worked at MicroWarehouse in 1989-91, so I know it existed then. We had about 40 of them. They weren't selling well.
People with clue about this are rare in these parts, it appears. It doesn't seem that long ago to me.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Uh oh... I'm being followed. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.